Weekly wrap of events of the week peppered with context, commentary and opinion by a superstar panel. Click here to support Newslaundry: http://bit.ly/paytokeepnewsfree Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Treść dostarczona przez F-Word + Audio Extras: Laura Flanders & Friends and Laura Flanders. Cała zawartość podcastów, w tym odcinki, grafika i opisy podcastów, jest przesyłana i udostępniana bezpośrednio przez F-Word + Audio Extras: Laura Flanders & Friends and Laura Flanders lub jego partnera na platformie podcastów. Jeśli uważasz, że ktoś wykorzystuje Twoje dzieło chronione prawem autorskim bez Twojej zgody, możesz postępować zgodnie z procedurą opisaną tutaj https://pl.player.fm/legal.
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Decisions, Decisions
1 EP 398: Rihanna Level Rebrand, GOATs of Podcasting & Live Show Reactions 54:26
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54:26Join Mandii B and Weezy WTF as they navigate the evolution of their podcasting journey in this candid and hilarious episode of “Decisions, Decisions.” Reflecting on nearly a decade of bold conversations, the duo opens up about the challenges and triumphs of rebranding their iconic show, previously known as “WHOREible Decisions.” Dive into their reasoning behind the name change, their growth as individuals, and the dynamics of creating space for nontraditional relationships and personal self-love. This episode features thought-provoking discussions on societal norms, reclaiming identity, and the complexities of managing a brand that champions inclusivity while addressing the limitations of media algorithms. From celibacy and creative reinvention to navigating life changes and unconventional lifestyles, Mandy and Weezy offer raw, unfiltered takes that will keep you engaged and inspired. Follow the hosts on social media Weezy @Weezywtf & Mandii B @Fullcourtpumps and follow the Decisions Decisions pages Instagram @_decisionsdecisions Don't forget to tag #decisionsdecisions or @ us to let us know what you think of this week's episode! Want more? Bonus episodes, merch and more Whoreible Decisions!! Become a Patron at Patreon.com/whoreibledecisions See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.…
F-Word: United Action To Keep Workers Down
Manage episode 293080177 series 1535187
Treść dostarczona przez F-Word + Audio Extras: Laura Flanders & Friends and Laura Flanders. Cała zawartość podcastów, w tym odcinki, grafika i opisy podcastów, jest przesyłana i udostępniana bezpośrednio przez F-Word + Audio Extras: Laura Flanders & Friends and Laura Flanders lub jego partnera na platformie podcastów. Jeśli uważasz, że ktoś wykorzystuje Twoje dzieło chronione prawem autorskim bez Twojej zgody, możesz postępować zgodnie z procedurą opisaną tutaj https://pl.player.fm/legal.
"Besides, if an extra $300 a week enables some to make ends meet without that stinking $7/hr job at the Dollar Store. Is that so bad? " Listen to The Laura Flanders Show for more on public media and independent media creators: "Labor Looks Up After Amazon Union Vote" LauraFlanders.org/Listen The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support theLFShow with your media muscles by becoming a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 or more, goto Patreon.com/theLFShow
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248 odcinków
Manage episode 293080177 series 1535187
Treść dostarczona przez F-Word + Audio Extras: Laura Flanders & Friends and Laura Flanders. Cała zawartość podcastów, w tym odcinki, grafika i opisy podcastów, jest przesyłana i udostępniana bezpośrednio przez F-Word + Audio Extras: Laura Flanders & Friends and Laura Flanders lub jego partnera na platformie podcastów. Jeśli uważasz, że ktoś wykorzystuje Twoje dzieło chronione prawem autorskim bez Twojej zgody, możesz postępować zgodnie z procedurą opisaną tutaj https://pl.player.fm/legal.
"Besides, if an extra $300 a week enables some to make ends meet without that stinking $7/hr job at the Dollar Store. Is that so bad? " Listen to The Laura Flanders Show for more on public media and independent media creators: "Labor Looks Up After Amazon Union Vote" LauraFlanders.org/Listen The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support theLFShow with your media muscles by becoming a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 or more, goto Patreon.com/theLFShow
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248 odcinków
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Bad Surprises, Good Surprises: Reflections on the Trump Rally in New York City | Commentary 4:00
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4:00LAURA FLANDERS - COMMENTARY EXCERPT: "I went into New York City to attend Donald Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden, but I couldn't get in. It was so oversubscribed, I was surprised. And as I stood there in the penned-in area with other would-be attendees, we watched on the jumbotron and I wondered about the other things I'd seen that had surprised me. Some of them right there at The Garden....." Listen to hear the entire commentary. This show is made possible by you! To become a sustaining member go to https://LauraFlanders.org/donate Thank you for your continued support!…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word- Jubilee Justice Regenerative Farming: Tackling Racism with Rice 3:30
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3:30You can watch The Laura Flanders Show report on The Jubilee Justice Black Farmers Rice Project on PBS stations across the nation, or on YouTube. In addition, we offer an audio version by subscribing to this free podcast and/or catch the special report airing on community radio stations. Details are at https://LauraFlanders.org The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. The Laura Flanders Show is made possible by our listeners and viewers. Please become a sustaining member or make a one time donation at https://LauraFlanders.org/donate…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Minnesota Democrats Codify Abortion Rights and More. It’s Not a ‘Miracle’ 4:00
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4:00"It’s being called the Minnesota miracle, but Minnesota’s historic legislative session was no act of god." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. The Laura Flanders Show is made possible by our listeners and viewers. Please become a sustaining member or make a one time donation at https://LauraFlanders.org/donate…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Moore v Harper and the War on Democracy in North Carolina 4:00
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4:00-excerpt from the latest commentary by Laura Flanders... "It has often been said that the US South is the testing ground for American democracy, which makes it frustrating how little attention national Democrats and their media pals give to Southern politics. A case in point is the decision by the North Carolina Supreme Court on April 28th, to reverse a series of election-related rulings that were handed down just months ago by the same court when it was dominated by Democrats." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. You can hear that special report in our series on The War on Democracy HERE=> https://lauraflanders.simplecast.com/episodes/deciding-the-fate-of-democracy-in-north-carolina And take a listen/watch our prior special reports in the series via the YouTube Playlist => https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOWumRv2zO8YCHuaVqDD-FPcY5pU4cim7 • The Forgotten Coup, January 6th & the Small Town Americans on the Frontlines of Democracy • Community Safety in a Time of Insurrection • North Carolina: Courageous Conversations in a Climate of Fear…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Trafficked workers’ Great Escape? 4:00
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4:00"Saket Soni is a brilliant labor organizer. He's also a talented storyteller. His first book, The Great Escape, A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America, tells the gripping, can't-put-it down tale of one of the largest human trafficking schemes in modern US history and how 500 Indian-born workers brought their corporate exploiters to account...." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. You can hear this week's show, via this podcast feed, with Saket Soni or catch Laura's full uncut conversation, through a patreon subscription at https://patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 The F-Word: Time to Stop Trashing the Luddites? 3:30
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3:30"Can we spare a few minutes to focus on Luddites?... and you’ll find that Luddites weren’t backward thinking thugs, but rather, skilled craftspeople whose lives were about to be wrecked." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. This podcast is made possible by you, our listeners. Please take a moment to become a member and support the show at https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
"What makes the obsession with polling so problematic is that it ignores the way that polls, even when they're right, are bad for our politics. Polls shrink our options, over-determine policy, and distract us from real life." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Flex your media muscles, become a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 at https://Patreon.com/theLFShow Independent Media! Advertising free!…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
"Win, lose or draw, the allure of the “white working class voter” never dulls for big D Democrats." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Flex your media muscles, become a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 at https://Patreon.com/theLFShow Independent Media! Advertising free!…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Election Deniers Aren't Born, They're Bred 3:30
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3:30You can catch my interview with award-winning reporter Soledad OBrien about how she recommends reporting on liars, through subscribing to the free Laura Flanders Show Podcast feed, or catch the program on hundreds of PBS stations and on YouTube. Go to https://LauraFlanders.org for more information. The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Flex your media muscles, become a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 at https://Patreon.com/theLFShow Independent Media! Advertising free!…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: A.M. Home's The Unfolding: On War and Also Walking Away 3:30
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3:30"Even more than democracy, the language of freedom vs. tyranny has characterized this year’s mid-term election campaigns." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Flex your media muscles, become a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 at https://Patreon.com/theLFShow Independent Media! Advertising free!…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Democracy is under Seige in Small Town USA 3:30
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3:30"'It would be easier for people to understand what could have happened on January 6th in DC, if they knew what actually happened on November 10th, in 1898, in Wilmington,' Cedric Harrison told me" The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Flex your media muscles, become a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 at https://Patreon.com/theLFShow Independent Media! Advertising free!…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Extreme Supremes Have Something Against Bodies 3:30
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3:30"Birth, earth, indigenous rule, even the “demos” of government itself… Kavanaugh and his crew seem to have something against bodies they can’t control, be they human or governmental." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Flex your media muscles, become a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 at http://Patreon.com/theLFShow Independent Media!…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 From SCOTUS to Shireen: Linda Sarsour: Same Extremism. Same Threat. 4:07
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4:07"A Supreme Court assault on reproductive equity, another racist slaughter, and more Palestinian death. It’s a lot." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Flex your media muscles, become a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 at http://Patreon.com/theLFShow Independent Media! Advertising free!…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Inflating Hopes & Dreams in Manchin Country? 4:00
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4:00"Something exciting is happening in McDowell County, West Virginia. There, in what used to be coal country, the American Federation of Teachers is leading a project called Reconnecting McDowell. It's a program initiated over a decade ago by Gayle Manchin, wife of now Senator (then Governor) Joe, and it makes you think long and hard about her husband." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Flex your media muscles, become a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 at http://Patreon.com/theLFShow Independent Media! Advertising free!…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word - Russia: A Nation of Informers. Texas too? 3:30
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3:30A culture of snitches? '...We describe it as horrifying when its happening in Putin's Russia, but just how different, really, is Texas?' The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Member supported, become a member today for early access to full conversations, online exclusives and more https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word - Russia: A Nation of Informers. Texas too? 3:30
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3:30A culture of snitches? '...We describe it as horrifying when its happening in Putin's Russia, but just how different, really, is Texas?' The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Member supported, become a member today for early access to full conversations, online exclusives and more https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Win the War. Invest in Peace. The Conversation we need to be having now 4:06
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4:06Civil society must demand peace and diplomacy over war and killing as a global community. The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests.
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: War is Til We Stop it for Maria and Manar 3:00
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3:00"Prison abolitionist Mariam Kaba says of struggle, “We do this 'til we free us.” Likewise, it seems to me, war is 'til we stop it. We need to stop it." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Flex your media muscles, become a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 at http://Patreon.com/theLFShow Independent Media! Advertising free!…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Prices Spiking, Options Shrinking. We're at a Tipping Point for Oil & Gas 4:00
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4:00"Stocks in renewables are out performing oil and gas right now. Tipping points tip and this could be one of those...." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Flex your media muscles, become a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 at http://Patreon.com/theLFShow Independent Media! Advertising free!…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Related episode to check out- "Your Neighborhood in your Hands: A Model from the South Bronx" "Carter, who has gone from fighting developers in the Bronx to becoming one herself, lost her family's home after her parents died when her siblings couldn't see the value in their property beyond the pittance they could get from speculators. She lost the home place, but determined to stay in the neighborhood space, and became what she became "an urban revitalization specialist." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Flex your media muscles, become a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 at http://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Win or Lose, Nominations Debates are Dangerous 4:00
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4:00"Justice Breyer has announced his resignation from the Supreme Court and a Biden/Harris pick is expected to win confirmation. The Democrats’ choice is unlikely to shift the court’s balance, we’re told, but the media’s milquetoast reassurance misses the point that when it comes to balance it’s not just the court, it’s also the public debate that’s shfted dramatically to the right. And nomination fights have a nasty habit of playing a big role in that.... " Related episode to check out- "Freedom for Women Requires Abolition Feminism: Suzanne Pharr & Beth Richie" . The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Flex your media muscles, become a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 at http://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Another World is Possible. Fascism Too, Is Breathing: Listening to Arundhati Roy. Related episode to check out- Arundhati Roy: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction and the Pandemic Portal The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Flex your media muscles, become a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 at http://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Federal Action for Media Could Undo Some Federal Damage 4:25
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4:25"A Free Press is vital if we are to have any chance at a functioning democracy. On that, you’d think, Right and Left might agree...." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests.
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 A Paramilitary Industrial Complex is Growing in Americans' Backyards 4:00
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4:00How are activists shutting down radicalized militia training facilities in defense of community safety? "Veteran activists organizing across this state [North Carolina], are concerned about a seemingly unmonitored flow of military grade weapons, training, and white warrior ideology out of the state’s privatized military and into civilian lives." Article in the Nation by Laura Flanders on Militia Training Camps: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/oak-grove-militia-training/ Listen and Download the Podcast/Radio Show and/or watch the TV Show Related to this commentary: https://lauraflanders.org/2021/10/community-safety-north-carolina/ The F-Word features timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Flex your media muscles, become a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 at http://Patreon.com/LauraFlandersandFriends…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: What Does It Take to Imagine the Future? Ask a Nic Unit Nurse 4:00
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4:00The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. "Changing the Future with India Walton... Buffalo drew attention this election season after first-time candidate, long-time activist, India Walton won the Democratic primary, positioning her to become this Democratic city’s first African American woman and first Democratic Socialist mayor." Flex your media muscles, become a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 at http://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Worker Co-ops Coped with Covid. Why Can't Others? 3:00
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3:00The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. October is National Co-op Month. "Worker co-ops like New Era demonstrate that it’s certainly possible to run a successful business while prioritizing safety and treating workers like fellow humans." Flex your media muscles, become a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 at http://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. "MacArthur 'genius award'winning landscape designer Kate Orff believes that gray infrastructure, like levees and flood gates and sea walls, can only take us so far." Flex your media muscles, become a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 at http://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Flex your media muscles, become a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 at http://Patreon.com/theLFShow
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
"Living free, with equality, dignity, equity and justice - requires more than law, it requires systemic change." This edition of Laura's commentary relates to the episode "Did a Summer Camp Help Spark a Disability Revolution?". Watch, listen, download and Check out the full episode notes here => https://Patreon.com/theLFShow The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Flex your media muscles by becoming a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 at http://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Buffalo's Next Mayor Is Putting Electeds on Notice 3:30
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3:30"Sometimes the good people win and that’s just what happened June 22 in Buffalo NY when community organizer, working mom and self described socialist, India Walton won the Democratic primary to stand for mayor in that Democratic town." If you missed our show you can listen/download the podcast or watch our feature on Making Buffalo Our City at our YouTube channel, just search Laura Flanders and Buffalo. The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Flex your media muscles by becoming a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 at Patreon. https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
"Class, race, gender, sexuality, place. What would shift in our minds, and our relations with each other, if we put trans lives and perspectives at the center? In addition to celebrating trans survival and trans courage, the makers of Disclosure subtly raise that question." The Podcast episode "Laverne Cox, Sam Feder: Trans Lives Depend on Owning Our Stories" and the full uncut conversation are all available in our podcast feed. Episode notes are available to members and non-members at Patreon.com/theLFShow Flex your media muscles by becoming a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 at Patreon.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: United Action To Keep Workers Down 3:30
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3:30"Besides, if an extra $300 a week enables some to make ends meet without that stinking $7/hr job at the Dollar Store. Is that so bad? " Listen to The Laura Flanders Show for more on public media and independent media creators: "Labor Looks Up After Amazon Union Vote" LauraFlanders.org/Listen The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support theLFShow with your media muscles by becoming a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 or more, goto Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: A New Deal for Democracy? Invest in Public Media 3:30
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3:30"While every other wealthy nation spends around $100 per citizen for public media of different kinds, the US government spends just over $1.00 on public broadcasting." Listen to The Laura Flanders Show for more on public media and independent media creators: "A New Day for Public TV" "Black Pain White Media: Introducing URL Media, a new, BIPOC network" https://LauraFlanders.org/Listen The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support theLFShow with your media muscles by becoming a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 or more, goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: January 6, Viewed From North Carolina 3:30
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3:30"Independent Media bring issues to the boil, mainstream media inhale the steam." Listen / Download the podcast "Black Pain White Media: Introducing URL Media, a new, BIPOC network" to hear about URL Media, Scalawag Magazine and more. Or watch it on your local PBS TV station, or on our YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/user/lauraflanders…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Arm our Cities with Military Grade Healthcare, not Weapons 3:30
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3:30"American #police are armed to the teeth with #military grade weapons and the results are in. The more combat gear, the more combat. So how about we armed our cities with military grade #healthcare instead?" The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support theLFShow with your media muscles by becoming a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 or more, goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-word: A Culture of Violence? The US Can Switch 4:00
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4:00"Culture of violence, culture of violence. If I hear that phrase wheeled out one more time to excuse a mass shooter, I’ll scream. That doesn’t mean I’ll head to the gun shop." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support theLFShow with your media muscles by becoming a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 or more, goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
"In the context of the Divine Right of Kings, the who-said-what-to-Harry and Meghan question. is most certainly missing the white supremacist forest for the trees." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support theLFShow with your media muscles by becoming a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 or more, goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 In Indian Country, It’s Not the Weather, It’s the Racism That’s Leaving Thousands In the Dark 3:00
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3:00"How do we live with the decades-long reality that tens of thousands of families in #IndianCountry have had no electricity and limited cell and broadband access - not for a day or a week - but for years already." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support theLFShow with your media muscles by becoming a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 or more, goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Impeaching Racism Needs to Happen Everywhere 3:30
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3:30"The second impeachment trial of Donald Trump began just as we were learning of the death, on February 7, of the bold and brilliant labor leader, Karen Lewis." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support theLFShow with your media muscles by becoming a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 or more, goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
"Like or loathe memes, it’s time for Sanders, and more to the point, Sanders-ism, to take its mittens off." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support theLFShow with your media muscles by becoming a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 or more, goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
"The answer to the mobster who riles up the lynch mob is media that’s moral, which is not what we have. What we have is media that’s motivated by money. And money, as we also saw this week, has no morals." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support with your media muscles by becoming a monthly sustaining member for $3, $5, $12 or more, goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
"... sing as he might about The Times They are A-Changing, Dylan’s deal, worth an estimated $300 million to him, changed nothing about anything. But it could have been different." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support by becoming a patron and help us reach our goal during our Holiday Fund Drive. Every dollar will be matched, doubling your contribution. goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
"All this how’s-he-doing coverage is par for the course as we transition to the next administration, but someone’s missing from this picture of our politics. It’s us." We’re coming up on Giving Tuesday. How about you take a look around and support the media that sees you back? Support by becoming a patron, goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Election day is upon us. Reading of the names of those who died due to the coronavirus pandemic. "This list needn't expand any longer. Vote in favor of our public health." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support by becoming a patron, goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
"For many Americans, there’s never been a better time to reconsider the entire system. Years of work, by abolitionists like Angela Davis, Ruthie Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, and organizations like Critical Resistance are paying off. With movements calling for defunding and divesting, people are finally talking about spending, and raising the heat on the thousands of corporations that profit off the millions of people we lock up." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support by becoming a patron, goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: If the President had HIV he could be in Prison 4:07
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4:07"Could Donald Trump be charged with a crime for knowingly exposing others to an infectious disease? He could if that disease was hepatitis. If the Donald was a poor man, poorly defended and in poor health, there’s a good chance he’d be facing criminal charges." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support by becoming a patron, goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Mourn Justice Ginsburg, Fight to Close Irwin Detention Center 4:00
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4:00"...one fitting way to honor the historic justice would be to take action on some unfinished feminist business. Justice Ginsburg is on my mind today, and so is Nurse Dawn Wooten....the ICE whistleblower who earlier this month called out abusive medical practices against immigrant women at a detention center in Georgia." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support by becoming a patron, goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Resisting Authoritarianism One Co-Op at a Time 3:30
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3:30"A popularly-elected Republic overturned by a reactionary armed revolt: There are myriad reasons why the painful history of the Spanish civil war might pop into ones head at this particular moment." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support by becoming a patron, goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Take on the Tech Mob now or Perish 3:00
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3:00"Six months into a global pandemic, the US economy just took its most grievous hit on record while Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook only added wealth. " The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support by becoming a patron, goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow That's also where you'll find our series "Forward Thinking on Covid-19".…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
"Transparency is important, especially in matters of public health. We treasure what we measure..." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support by becoming a patron, goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow That's also where you'll find our series "Forward Thinking on Covid-19".…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
We can not cling to the cruel lie that economic success is the product of individual merit and sweat. The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support by becoming a patron, goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow That's also where you'll find our series "Forward Thinking on Covid-19".…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: What lies ahead: Tulsa 1921 or Somewhere We Haven’t Built Yet? 3:30
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3:30"Every Juneteenth has me thinking about life and the unknown, and the experience of those who lived two and half years enslaved, denied the news that the Civil War was over and the North had won. We don’t always know what moment we are living in. Or what lies on the other side of now. ... In this 400th year of colonial American slave capitalism we don’t know, for example, what it is to live equal and free." Watch/Listen to this week's LFShow "Putting Public Safety in Public Hands: The Newark Model" https://lauraflanders.org/shows/ The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support by becoming a patron, goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow That's also where you'll find our series "Forward Thinking on Covid-19".…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
"Defund Police. Invest in Black Lives. What just weeks ago was a slogan is fast becoming law." Watch/Listen to this week's LFShow "Putting Public Safety in Public Hands: The Newark Model" https://lauraflanders.org/shows/ The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support by becoming a patron, goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow That's also where you'll find our series "Forward Thinking on Covid-19".…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
So which will it be? Will this disaster spark a shift for the better? Or will the deadly myths white Americans tell ourselves survive Covid19? Memorial Day messaging bodes ill. The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support by becoming a patron, goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow That's also where you'll find our series "Forward Thinking on Covid-19".…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
"When it comes to cashing in on Covid 19 the race has just begun. Whether you’re talking education, or contact tracing or medicine or mind control, an anti-democratic dystopian future is being charted fast, while we the people are locked down, locked up and locked out." The F-Word is released bi-weekly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support by becoming a patron. That's also where you'll find our series "Forward Thinking on Covid-19".…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
The F-Word is released bi-monthly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. The latest: "Four to five hundred million dollars is what our deadly president claims the US is contributing to the World Health Organization per year, the contribution he says he wants to suspend. For reference, $300 million is what Mr Trump owes Deutsche Bank on loans connected to the Trump Organization’s failing Washington hotel, the same hotel for which the Trump Organization has applied to the Trump Administration for relief." Watch/LISTEN to our NEW SERIES Forward Thinking on Covid-19 where guests offer their view point from a forward looking perspective in their area of expertise. Become a Patreon member to unlock the full unedited conversations. This week, Hamid Khan Coordinator of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition of the Los Angeles Community Action Network speaking on contact tracing and policing bodies in the name of public health and Dara Baldwin Director of National Policy for the Center for Disability Rights on the big money power that’s still being felt even in the Covid- quieted halls of Congress.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Thank you Bernie. Screw You, New York Times 3:00
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3:00The F-Word is released bi-monthly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support by becoming a patron, goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow The latest: "It is the essence of American liberalism to trash radical dreams and then dance on them. And that’s just what the New York Times did, the day after Bernie Sanders bowed out of the Democratic race for the nomination."…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word- Covid-19: Our Health Crisis is born of Bigotry 3:30
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3:30"A bridge is only as strong as its weakest part. Former slave turned educator Anna Julia Cooper uttered those very contemporary-sounding words back in 1893. The US didn’t heed them then. We haven’t heeded them yet. The big question, brought home to us one more time by the Covid 19 crisis, is why not? What does American society so love about having weak parts that we refuse, year after year, and epidemic after epidemic to shore them up?" The F-Word is released bi-monthly featuring timely commentaries by Laura Flanders and guests. Support by becoming a patron, goto https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word- February/March: The Pandering Months 3:30
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Democracy vs Dictatorship: Don't Let Bloomberg Muddy That Choice 3:30
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1 F-Word: SayHerName, Impeachment and the Hawk 3:30
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3:30"I was thinking about impeachment when a bird fell out of the sky. ......Dazed, on the sidewalk, she stood perfectly still, protected by gentle cops and generous yards of yellow caution tape... It happened to be the same week, five years ago, that Tanisha Anderson died on the street in front of her home, when she was having one of her bad days." The F-Word, Laura Flanders' bi-weekly commentary. Goal, reach 100 Patrons by end of year. You down? For as little as $3 a month support, be a part of our crowd. Sign up today! https://patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: THE GLOBAL CORRUPTION REBELLION AMERICANS DON'T KNOW THEY'RE PART OF 4:00
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4:00"In a system that's unequal, corruption is not just the way we swim, it’s the water we swim in..." The F-Word, Laura Flanders' bi-monthly commentary. Help us thrive and not just survive, by becoming a member you'll unlock additional audio extras and more. https://Patreon.com/theLFShow
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Climate Strike/Auto Strike: Same Struggle, Same Fight 3:30
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3:30"Almost fifty thousand workers went on strike at General Motors Sept 16th, 2019, after management and United Auto Workers Union negotiators failed to agree on a new contract. GM has bounced back from recession thanks to a taxpayer bailout, government tax breaks and contracts and a brutal restructuring of the workforce. Now even though the company’s made $35 billion in the last few years - they want concessions, and yet more plant closures and layoffs." Help us thrive and not just survive, by becoming a member you'll unlock additional audio extras and more. https://Patreon.com/theLFShow image: courtesy of Flipboard…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: From Voice of America to NPR: New CEO Lansing's Glass House 3:00
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3:00"I don’t know about you but I take a teeny weeny bit of offense when a guy in a glass house lobs a great big stone and expects me not to notice the sound of shattering." Laura Flanders' bi-weekly commentary, The F-Word. Subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribers receive the weekly show, plus audio extras like Laura's commentary The F-Word. Help us thrive and not just survive, by becoming a member you'll unlock the full transcript of Jerome Roos' interview along with additional audio extras and more. https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
One-two-three-four/ What are we waiting for? Fifty years on, after a night spent largely on that big wet, now commercialized field in Bethel, New York, I'm pondering what’s happened since. What’s taken so long? You can see a mash up picture of Laura Flanders at Woodstock, and a picture of that Janis Joplin lunch box – and take a listen to this week's podcast re-share of a popular interview with music producer Danny Goldberg about the Hippie Revolution – and a performance of Climbing Poetree. https://LauraFlanders.org/Listen…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Jerome Roos's Smart Take On The Next Financial Crisis 4:30
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4:30This week's commentary comes by way of Jerome Roos, an LSE Fellow in international political economy at the London School of Economics and founding editor of ROAR Magazine. He paints a grim picture of a global finance system that's taken a gamble having sought to solve the problem of too much debt with even more debt. And this precarious pile-up of gambling chips might also point to another, less talked about reason, why President Trump has spent so much time and energy attacking the chairman of the Fed. He knows a crash is coming, and he wants someone to blame. This pile’s going to fall on someone—the question is, on whom? Help us thrive and not just survive, by becoming a member you'll unlock the full transcript of Jerome Roos' interview along with additional audio extras and more. https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Love and Rights: Contingent or Unconditional? 3:30
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3:30"Are rights things to be granted by the powerful to the deserving few, contingent on their obedience, someone’s convenience, and adherence to the prevailing rules and conventions? Or...." Help us thrive and not just survive, by becoming a member https://Patreon.com/theLFShow
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 In Barcelona, Being a Fearless City Mayor Means Letting the People Decide 3:30
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3:30No matter the result of the elections, Barcelona's Ada Colau and Barcelona en Comú continue to put principles into practice. Subscribe to theLFShow Podcast to receive Laura Flanders' commentary. Support theLFShow! Help us thrive and not just survive, by becoming a member. https://Patreon.com/theLFShow soundcloud include the entire URL https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Today on the F-word we have a report from Spain. 80 years ago this April Spain fell under a brutal 30 year dictatorship after right beat left in a brutal civil war, General Franco's rebels backed by Mussolini and Hitler and the religious extremists of his days defeated the republic and its' cobbled together army of anarchists, communists, and internationalists. Today, Spain holds the largest Social-democratic bloc in the EU and the Mondragón Collective is an example for solidarity economics, internationally.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
"The Attorney General’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee and his standoff with the House may be important. Something, sometime, may come of it. But let’s consider the opportunity cost of all that one-note coverage." Support the LFShow! https://patreon.com/theLFShow Subscribe to the podcast, https://LauraFlanders.org/podcast…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
"white nationalists have been targeting bookstores and libraries across the country for a while"....."It’s not the hate that’s new. It’s the apparent sense of entitlement. ....they’re out in plain sight, and not just in the media’s backwaters but in the nation’s capital...." The F-Word, Laura Flanders' commentary. Support the LFShow! become a member during our May Day to Memorial Day membership drive. https://Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Lyra McKee, Shot Dead In Derry, Reported on the Uncomfortable 3:00
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3:00"These days, establishment journalists spend inordinate amounts of time, bemoaning their own welfare and the state of their beleaguered industry. but it’s rarely been journalism fed and watered by the establishment that’s asked anything uncomfortable and McKee called for us to have uncomfortable conversations." The F-Word, Laura Flanders' commentary. Support the LFShow! You'll receive a copy of Laura Flanders' Izzy Award acceptance speech on independent journalism and additional audio extras and more by becoming a member for as little as $2 a month. Patreon.com/theLFShow…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Oh no! What will the money media report on now that Russia-gate has proven to be a dud? Not to worry, there’s plenty of collusion in plain sight, and it wouldn’t take a twenty-two month inquiry to find Trump conspiring with enemies of US democracy. Let’s start with Trump’s relationship with killer corporations and hate groups. The F-Word, Laura Flanders' commentary. Support the LFShow! https://www.patreon.com/thelfshow Subscribe to the podcast: http://www.LauraFlanders.org/Listen…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
The State of Washington has declared a public health emergency due to spreading outbreaks of Measles. The World Health Organization credits "Vaccine Hesitancy" as a cause of the resurgence. And Trump tops it off by tweeting his doubts about vaccines and what he's called doctor inflicted diseases—it looks like more than just the measles are contagious! Help us not just survive, but thrive by becoming a member of theLFShow. www.LauraFlanders.org/Donate…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Making American Journalism Great and Different 4:00
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4:00The same miserable mob that mauled main street banks has plundered and pillaged newspapers across the country. Pursuing only profits, private hedge funds bought and stripped even long-lived legacy papers leaving them for dead. One in five local papers has shut up shop in the last 10 years, according to a recent report from the Knight Foundation. Check out Laura Flanders report for the Next System, "Next System Media: An Urgent Necessity" and more coverage at our website in our archives. https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/next-system-media-urgent-necessity Help us not just survive, but thrive by becoming a member of theLFShow. http://www.LauraFlanders.org/Donate…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Time For Socialist History Month? 2:30
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2:30Laura Flanders' commentary, The F-Word. Host of The Laura Flanders Show airing on TV & Radio and streaming & by podcast subscription. http://www.LauraFlanders.org/listen Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. By becoming a member, you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content! http://www.LauraFlanders.org/donate…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: An End to Amazon’s Two-Bit Romance. No Low-Rent Rendez-Vous 3:00
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3:00Like a macho man in the pre-feminist era, Amazon wanted things their way or no way. That’s how monopolies roll. Don’t ask questions, don’t consider options, and whatever you do, don’t conduct a background check. Becoming a member, you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content! www.LauraFlanders.org/subscribe…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: In Prison, the Power’s On But There’s No Accountability 3:00
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3:00Hour after hour of hands hammering on windows at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn was chilling, until the President’s State of the Union Speech. Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. By becoming a member, you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content! http://www.LauraFlanders.org/donate…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: In the French Yellow Vests Murdoch Finds a Movement to Like 2:30
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2:30"By many accounts Macron's paying the price not so much for taxing carbon as for ignoring inequality and passing tax breaks for the rich, while pushing more austerity on people already at breaking point." Laura Flanders, weekly commentary. Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. By becoming a member you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content! http://www.LauraFlanders.org/Donate…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: HUD Official to Move into Public Housing? 3:00
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3:00HUD NY official Lynne Patton is planning on moving into NYCHA projects, but why not move big money OUT of housing instead? Make a year end donation. Support 10 years of the Laura Flanders Show. http://www.LauraFlanders.org/donate
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Amazon Gives to End Homelessness? That’s Rich 3:00
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3:00The F-Word, Laura Flanders' weekly commentary. Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. By becoming a member, you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content!
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: From Voting to Wealth Building for Native Americans 3:30
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3:30Building a new economy for and by Native Americans requires election level attention beyond election week. That new book out from the Democracy Collective, "An Indigenous Approach to Community Wealth Building: A Lakota Translation". https://democracycollaborative.org/community-wealth-building-a-lakota-translation Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. By becoming a member, you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content! http://www.LauraFlanders.org/donate…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
"The particular patriarchs whom white women have put in office this November are on the record, anti-female. " Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. By becoming a member, you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content! http://www.LauraFlanders.org/Listen
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Someone scrawled KILL N@%gers on the African Burial Ground National Monument in New York this week, not thirty five feet from the headquarters of the Department of Homeland Security, ICE and the FBI. Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. By becoming a member, you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content! http://www.LauraFlanders.org…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Is Donald Trump Responsible For Violence? Absolutely 3:30
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3:30Is Donald Trump responsible for unhinged violence against innocent people? Absolutely. You only have to look at Yemen to see that. Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. By becoming a member, you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content!
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Fighting Chance in Virginia’s Fighting 9th 4:00
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4:00"For a while last week, I thought I was in the wrong place. While the nation’s eyes were on the Kavanaugh hearings, I was in southwest Virginia, with a congressional campaign in rural America that big donors and DC Democrats don’t seem to care that much about." Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. By becoming a member, you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content! http://www.LauraFlanders.org…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: It’s Time to call #TimesUp on Standing Alone 3:00
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3:00"September 28, when a woman, Ana Maria Archila, stuck her foot in the door of an elevator and gave Republican Jeff Flake, a potential swing voter, a talking-to, and kept that foot in that door so that another woman could do the same, as the cameras rolled, live. The video went viral." "Whatever happens on the (SCOTUS) court, in the rough times ahead, let’s do what Ana Maria Archila did. Let’s let no one stand alone." Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. By becoming a member, you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content!…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: 10 Years on, The End of Capitalism is Easier to Imagine 3:30
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3:30'Not long after the financial crash of 2008, I heard someone say, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Is it?' Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. By becoming a member, you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content!
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Markers - Past, Present, Public, Private 3:00
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3:00"This particular plaque for my father made me think about something else too. If it wasn't for inclusive design, I literally would not exist." Check out our SPECIAL REPORT: Ableism Out, Independent Living Now! http://www.stitcher.com/s?eid=56122055 Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. By becoming a member, you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content! http://www.LauraFlanders.org/membership…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Ominous Silence on the Anniversary of the ADA 3:30
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3:30Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. By becoming a member, you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content!
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Cooperatives, From Brooklyn to Brattleboro 3:30
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3:30Socialism is as close as your closest coop. Check our our UK special with Jeremy Corbyn- UK Labour: http://www.stitcher.com/s?eid=55387497 Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. By becoming a member, you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content!
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Jeff Sessions Sets Back The Clock 3:00
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3:00Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. By becoming a member, you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content! www.LauraFlanders.org/membership
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
"Smash society and you create craven people. Craven, from the early English word meaning crushed, defeated, overwhelmed." Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. By becoming a member, you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content!
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Bottom Up Wins In Virginia’s Primaries 3:00
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3:00A certain handshake in Singapore dominated the news June 12, so you may have missed Virginia’s Democratic primaries. Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. By becoming a member, you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content! http://www.LauraFlanders.org/membership
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Liberal and Establishment Media Thwarting Populist Politics 3:30
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3:30The commentary is an excerpt taken from our online-only interview with Chomsky, where the famed linguist analyzed the state of geo-nuclear politics, the crisis of climate change, and the need for international solidarity against proliferation. Check out all our web exclusives including the latest featuring Christine Hong: 'Nuclear Brinkmanship is Business As Usual for US-North Korea Relations'. Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. By becoming a member, you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content! http://www.LauraFlanders.org/donate…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Throwing Shade not Light on Youth Voting 3:00
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3:00The Laura Flanders Show @GRITlaura @TheLFShow Become a sustaining member for as little as $2/month and keep The LF Show forward-looking, audacious and ad-free. Visit: http://lauraflanders.com/donate.
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-word: After Brexit, Blexit: Putting Your Money Where Your Life Is 3:00
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3:00Public banks serving public interests. Find out more about BLEXIT at http://NextCity.org and learn about the Banking for Justice campaign at http://NewEconomynyc.org and watch the Laura Flanders Show. Please write a review in iTunes. Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. By becoming a member, you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content!…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: What if Ida B Wells Depended on Facebook? 3:30
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3:30"After Ida B. Wells published a column on May 21, 1892, denouncing “the old threadbare lie,” that lynching was used to “protect white womanhood,” a white mob marched to her office in Memphis, destroyed her presses and left a warning they would kill Wells if she tried to publish her newspaper again.That lie was the most heard, most accepted, most familiar, trusted, conventional, common fact. It’s taken the nation a century to wise up. We don't have that long and we've no reason to repeat." Please take the time to write a review on iTunes: https://apple.co/2nXR6G6 Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. Become a member today patreon.com/theLFShow Thank you!…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Water, Profit and Public Trust in Michigan 3:00
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3:00Two hundred dollars a year, to make private profits off public water is little for Nestle Water Company in the state of Michigan. When it’s what residents in Flint Michigan are paying every month to drink private water because the public supply’s been poisoned, it’s a lot. http://flowforwater.org Become a member today http://Patreon.com/theLFShow Thank you!…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: U.S. Led Strike on Syria More of a Show of Weakness 3:30
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3:30“Politicians and pundits tend to get excited about war, but the US-led strike on Syria of April 14th, was more of a show of weakness than of strength, veteran Middle East correspondent, Patrick Cockburn tells Laura Flanders.“ Patrick has reported on the middle east since the 1970's. Please take the time to write a review in iTunes. Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. Become a member today http://patreon.com/theLFShow Thank you!…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: USA Human Rights Double Standard on Palestine and Syria 8:00
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8:00USA on Human Rights Has a Double Standard on Palestine and Syria: As Israeli forces kill unarmed demonstrators for a third week in Gaza and while the US simultaneously prepares to strike Syria over human rights abuses, I spoke to Lana Abu Hijileh, Country Director-Global Communities, a Palestinian humanitarian and development professionals attending the SKOLL World Forum conference in Oxford, UK, April 13, 2018. Please take the time to write a review on iTunes. Thank you! Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. Become a member today.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: We Need Local Media For Our Health 3:00
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3:00F-Word: We Need Local Media For Our Health by Laura Flanders
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F-Word: Sesta Doesn't Make Us Safer by Laura Flanders
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
F-Word: An Exception to the Rule In Rio by Laura Flanders
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: 'Headline: Time for Farm to Table Fairness' 3:00
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3:00F-Word: ?'Headline: Time for Farm to Table Fairness' by Laura Flanders
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: West Virginia Workers And the Taste of Solidarity 2:30
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2:30F-Word: West Virginia Workers And the Taste of Solidarity by Laura Flanders
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: West Virginia Workers And the Taste of Solidarity 2:30
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2:30F-Word: West Virginia Workers And the Taste of Solidarity by Laura Flanders
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F-Word: Smear’s The Thing by Laura Flanders
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
F-Word: #IraqToo by Laura Flanders
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
F-Word: Dr King and the Ram by Laura Flanders
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F-Word: America’s New Fossil Fuel Moment by Laura Flanders
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-Word: Who Needs DeNeuve When We Have Judge Aquilina? 3:00
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3:00F-Word: Who Needs DeNeuve When We Have Judge Aquilina? by Laura Flanders
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1 F-Word: Trump's Migration Program Mimics the Cold War Dragnet 3:00
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3:00F-Word: Trump's Migration Program Mimics the Cold War Dragnet by Laura Flanders
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Life or Death to the FCC by Laura Flanders
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-word: From Washington to Jerusalem - It’s not Reckless. It’s a wreck 2:30
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2:30F-word: From Washington to Jerusalem - It’s not Reckless. It’s a wreck by Laura Flanders
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 F-word: Wanted, This Christmas, A Media-Monopoly Bust Up 3:00
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3:00This week's commentary covers the ongoing battle over the future of Net-Neutrality. As if 2017 hasn't been filled with enough threats to our civil liberties, the ax seems to finally be coming down on so-called Net Neutrality laws. Historically, the role of FCC has been to regulate the airwaves with the purpose of promoting localism, competition, and diversity all in the spirit of public service. There has never been a doubt that the current Head of the FCC (and Net Neutrality's Executioner-in-Chief) Agit Pai's sympathies lie with corporate monopolies. What do I want for Christmas? Simple! An internet free from the greed of corporate interest and a few anti-trust suits! Go to http://freepress.net, sign the petition, and call your representatives!…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Election Night: Dems Divided Down Progressive Fault Lines? 3:00
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3:00Plus, an F-word from Laura on how election night wins on the part of Democrats shouldn't conceal their internal fissures or the work being done by progressives. Tis the season to make that year end donation. Keep this commentary ad free! http://LauraFlanders.com/donate
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Fword: Weinstein Suggests It’s Time for a Shared Power Index for Companies 3:00
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3:00Fword: Weinstein Suggests It’s Time for a Shared Power Index for Companies by Laura Flanders
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Catalan Crisis or Capitalist Crisis? by Laura Flanders
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Absolute Media Power Corrupts Absolutely by Laura Flanders
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If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention and if you are, well the feds know about it.
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Made Homeless by Hurricanes? This Budget’s Not For You 3:05
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3:05Made Homeless by Hurricanes? This Budget’s Not For You by Laura Flanders
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Anti Racist Rebellions Deserve Their Own Monuments 3:15
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3:15A commentary from Laura on monuments - where are the monuments to the motley crew and our antiracist predecessors?
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 On the Side of the Mob: American Interests in Venezuela 3:00
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3:00In the case of Venezuela -- President Trump’s on the side of the mob, not the government. The burners, not the burnt. Still he’s asking the right questions: Look around. What’s going on? And are we going to tolerate it?
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 On the Diggers - The Revolution Will Be Fed 2:03
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2:03A commentary from Laura on the Diggers and feeding while rebelling.
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 People Who Stand for Justice, Not the Just-Us 2:53
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2:53Laura Flanders on the recently passed Reproductive Equity Act in Oregon that extends heath coverage to all Oregonians, including trans and undocumented people. Watch the full episode at www.lauraflanders.com
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Hunger Strike Against Inhumane Detention of Immigrants 2:50
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2:50You've gotta wonder, protests, congress, hunger strike, deaths? What's it gonna take before Americans notice what's happening?
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Hell In Hamburg? The G20 Summit Could Have Been Worse. 3:23
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3:23Laura Flanders on the G20 summit and prospects for resistance.
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Progressive Power Shifts From the Bottom Up 3:22
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3:22An F-word from Laura on why, and how, progressives need to respond to the Russia fiasco by buckling down on a focus towards local power shifts.
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People Have A Right to Repair by Laura Flanders
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Zombie Economics and Zombie Malls are a Problem 3:28
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3:28We can't look to the dying economics of retail and so-called unskille work to move us in to the future.
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1 On Pope Francis, Concentration Camps and US 3:17
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3:17So what about the subhuman conditions we systematically herd whole populations into through war, segregation, expulsion, redlining detention, incarceration?
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Nuclear Provocation Update: It's Not Just North Korea 2:48
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2:48Laura on why there isn't just one major nuclear aggressor in the world, and in fact, we have to look homewards to find some key nuclear players.
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1 Putin's Alleged Crimes Distract Us From The GOP's Real Ones 2:28
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2:28Laura's weekly F-word on why focusing on what Russia's head of state might have done, is distracting us from what he's actually doing.
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1 Trump's Budget is Socialism for the Rich and Corporates 3:08
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3:08Laura’s F-Word on why Donald Trump’s new budget isn’t about cuts -- it’s about conversions. The budget wants to convert public dollars into private funding for military research and spending, for the only government apparatus that never gets audited.
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Happy White Cis Het Capitalist Patriarchy Month? 2:30
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2:30Happy White Cis Het Capitalist Patriarchy Month? by Laura Flanders
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1 The Roots of International Working Women’s Day 2:47
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2:47Laura goes back to where the International Women's Day began: in the dire straights of striking women, demanding autonomy and a right to the way they lived.
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1 The Merit in Merit-Based Immigration is Political 1:26
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1:26Laura describes how the history of Irish immigration to the United States shows the way lines drawn for deciding immigrants "merit" are blurry.
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Trump's Migration Program Mimics the Cold War Dragnet 3:24
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3:24Laura's F-Word this week on how the Trump administration has launched a Soviety era, McCarthyist witch hunt to catch "illegal" immigrants, that's not really about immigrants at all.
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It's not too far out to think that Trump and co.'s first target might be the judiciary courts themselves. Laura takes a look.
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Taking A Breath From The Political Moment 3:05
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3:05An F-Word from Laura on taking a breath in the midst of panic, to recollect, and then, organize.
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Who governs is important, but what we really need to be talking about is government itself. Let's remember that least discussed statistic, 49% of eligible voters, some 117 million Americans, didn't even cast a vote in a country where registering is pretty darn difficult. That level of non-participation reflects an alienation that should be setting off alarm bells.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
In the days since the election, the Trump team have stated their intention to 'open up' (nonexistent) libel laws and sue the elect's accusers. But it's not just about protecting old bastions of media, it's about transforming the very way we think about media and its role in directing our behavior. #TakeBackTheMedia…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Laura Flanders, on why she hopes voters will never have to make this choice again.
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Laura's F-Word on the new documentary Political Animals, which tracks the four California Assemblywomen that put in motion the pieces that allowed marriage equality to happen.
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Laura's F-Word on what happens to the house when the glass ceiling is broken, with notes from feminist scholar Anna Julia Cooper's famed 1893 speech, "Women's Cause is One and Universal."
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
A few words from Laura on how to keep mobilizing and organizing -- in spite of stress.
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Laura speaks a little on why winner takes all media isn't helping voters.
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
On this week's F-Word: Laura talks about the complicated history many LGBTQ people have with pride, and why at its best, it still proclaims solidarity and joy.
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Rosa Luxembourg: Reform or Revolution as a Lesson for Modern Times 2:58
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2:58On this week's F-Word, Laura reminds us of the German socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxembourg who, while living in an epoch eerily similar to ours, called for reform against capitalism.
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On this week's F-Word, Laura asks why Apple, one of the most profitable companies on the planet, borrows so much money. Find out more at www.lauraflanders.com/read
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Ancient law, contemporary blowback, a chase-the-rich approach to developing your local economy. It’s not just Puerto Rico that’s mired in debt and a crisis that’s sparing the rich at the expense of the poor. It’s also New Haven. That Connecticut city is in a long drawn out fight with its very own colonial power: Yale University. At isssue is a series of bills that seek to clarify an 1834 state law that granted Yale a special tax exemption. In the eyes of the law, private colleges are like charities. They provide a public service, and because they serve the public good, they are exempt from certain federal and state taxes. At the city level, under that 1834 law, Yale was exempted paying tax on buildings that partly house commercial activity activity too. And New Haven’s seen a lot of Yale-based commercial activity. We’ve seen it all over the United States. New Haven’s dominated by Yale a university-medical-complex: in Baltimore, it was Johns Hopkins, in Jackson Mississippi… IN New Orleans. What those cites have in common is as manufacturing’s declined, universities and their “research parks” or hospitals have expanded. Local officials are attracted to Eds and Meds - institutions that promise growth while doing good. They bring in federal and state dollars. They get tax breaks. Yet the boasts don’t automatically translate into economic or social health for the surrounding communities. Yale is growing geographically and financially; its budget is bigger than many counties. Its endowment tops $23 billion. The college and its health complex are New Haven’s largest employer, occupying some 1,000 acres surrounded by poor and working-class neighborhoods where unemployment rates among African Americans and Latinos stand at between 18 and 20 percent - double that of the city’s white residents. Hospital workers mostly earn low part time wages and are not members of unions. Since taxing real estate and other property is the only form of municipal taxation allowed by state law, New Haven Mayor Toni Harp says that the city needs to update its guidelines. She’s been backing various bills to reconsider Yales 1834 exemption. She’s up against the Ivy League and local business leaders. Yale President Peter Salovey threatened that any change, would lead to a loss of jobs - a decline in research - and the eviction of the symphony. Still Harp and her colleagues are not backing down. And that’s in part because they have the backing of a community led coalition, of clergy, labor, progressive and community alliance. The economy has changed over 182 years, the law needs to do likewise. Watch this space for an anti-colonial movement against colonial corporations.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Celebrating Ali, Collectivizing Courage: Dave Zirin w. Laura Flanders on WBAI 12:25
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12:25On his way to #MuhammadAli's memorial in Louisville, KY, Ali's hometown, Nation Magazine editor and @EdgeofSports podcaster Dave Zirin talks with @TheLFShow's Laura Flanders about the man, his message and his "last great act of resistance" -- his Muslim send-off. Zirin also weighs in on NY Governor Andrew Cuomo's week: celebrating Ali while simultaneously criminalizing a Palestine solidarity campaign that would have had Ali's support. Laura's been guest-hosting the @WBAI Morning Show on the first Friday of the month. Listen or watch her TV show at laurasflanders.com.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
One man moves and a whole state shakes? When that one man is hedge fund billionaire David Tepper, that’s just what happens. David Tepper is a multi-billion dollar hedge fund manager who’s lived in New Jersey for more than 20 years. Now he’s moving his home and his business to low-tax Florida. And That’ll cost New Jersey millions, probably hundreds of millions in lost tax revenue. New Jersey is not alone. According to one New York Times report, the top one percent of residents pay a third or more of total income taxes in half a dozen states: New Jersey, New York, California, Connecticut and Maryland. Wealth’s flowed so much from the bottom to the top in such large amounts that entire states are now dependent on a tiny powerful class. What’s a state to do? The New York Times reports that states are doing everything they can to get their fat cats to stay. But really, is that the only way to go? I took a look at Tepper’s wealth. First, it’s financial wealth: hedge fund managers don’t make things or sell things, they place bets. Tepper made a whole hunk of his personal wealth (some $4 billion dollars) from a 2009 investment in distressed financial stocks, including Bank of America. Buying low, he sold high when it recovered. But who helped it recover? We did. Taxpayers. In 2008 and ‘09, Bank of America received $45 billion from the U.S. government through the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Remember TARP? And a $118 billion federal guarantee against loss? While we’re talking rich, it’s a bit darn rich, for him to fret about paying back, isn’t it? And a bit ridiculous of New Jersians to do anything but bid guys like that good riddance, and set about distributing their assets more widely. Have we forgotten everything we ever knew about the US revolution? No aristocrats. No feudal lords welcome here. Comments? Write to me: laura@lauraflanders.com, and thanks.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 The Human Cost of Automation or "My Miserable Travel Experience" 2:30
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2:30Automation automation everywhere. Wherever you look, robots are in, and precarious work is getting precarious-er. Take telephone operators, it’s been years since I spoke to one. I kinda miss'em. Bank tellers are probably next. Business Insider reports that banks could see a 30% reduction in staff over the next ten years and along with the tellers are the bank branches in which they work. Mobile bank apps don’t need real people or real estate, it turns out. The automated world’s an efficient and cost-conscious world. At least that’s what we’re told. It’s what I was told, for about 20 minutes straight, not long ago, when on hold with an airline company. When they finally did pick up – or rather a computer picked up, and took my details several times over: date, time, mothers maiden name. A mechanical voice then finally told me that I would save money and time by entering all that data, again, into a form online. Every minute of my time and custom they assured me, is valuable and valued; But before they were finished, they hung up on me. Date, time, mothers maiden name, Having finally put all that in again and purchased a ticket, I arrived at the airport. I checked in online, but still I’m greeted by a screen that asks sincerely about my packing and then directs me to a person who wont touch my bag but tells me to lift it myself onto a scale and then carry off to a distant conveyor belt. There’s a retirement home somewhere filled with unhappy baggage handlers and travel agents. I'm sure of it. Finally, though, I was through the security check, now the most up close and personal part of the whole experience – and into the departure lounge, once the site of cheap restaurants and dark sports bars. The chatty wait staff have all been replaced by iPad like tablets on every table, I discovered. Glowing green, they reflect the irate faces of all the frustrated customers. No chatty waiter, no barman with an eye on your flights. Only a harried food carrier who says she can only respond to the computer. It’s all enough to make you almost relish the crush of crowded flesh against flesh on the actual airplane. Someone somewhere may be saving money. But efficient - for whom? Not me if you tally up all that screen time. And what’s the price do you think, if we put one on human to human connection?…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Who Needs Panama When You Have the Home State of Joe Biden? 2:20
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2:20"Enough time has gone by that it’s worth following up on a question raised but then rapidly dropped this spring. Remember the Panama papers? That staggering dump of 11.5 million documents leaked on fourteen thousand clients of the law firm Mossack Fonseca in Panama. Mossack Fonseca offered legal assistance to people and businesses seeking to set up shop in tax havens around the world. A couple of hundred US addresses showed up in the Panama Papers. Not all belonged to American citizens, but some did. The Obama-connected Pritzker family name appeared, as did others, like John Michael Crim, a convicted tax-evader, and Democratic donor / movie mogul David Geffen. Still, no big American banks, no huge Americans firms. As a result, no crowds massed demanding resignations, and unlike in Iceland, no political heads rolled. But maybe they should have. Why so few Americans? Part of the explanation is probably media bias. You should never discount the deference in our media for those with money and influence, or the disdain they have for reporting that’s done mostly elsewhere. But the most important part of the answer is: Americans don’t need Fonseca. Plenty of US law firms manage offshore assets right here. They don’t need to go to Panama because they can find those firms in the US. There’s nothing illegal after all, about setting up an offshore trust. What’s illegal is hiding your assets to avoid paying debts or tax. The US is a world-class tax-haven nation, because American laws on corporate structures are so flexible, the tax breaks we offer corporations are so big, and the tax we charge on capital gains is so extra-especially low. The fact is, it is hard to find a more attractive place to make a lot of money, than right here; and states like Nevada and Delaware offer virtual anonymity for corporate clients. Who needs Panama when we have the home state of Joe Biden? Come to think of it, maybe that’s why we’ve heard the White House say so little about Fonseca. Scandal? What scandal? Finding legal ways to dodge your debts to the nation is the good old American way of doing business."…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Lucy Parsons: The Anarchist & Intersectional Feminist Who Inspired May Day 2:15
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2:15"Workers shouldn't strike and go out and starve, but strike and remain in, and take possession, said Lucy Parsons. Lucy Parsons was of Mexican American, African American, and Native american descent. Born into slavery, a feminist, anarchist, and a leading labor activist, she was an intersectional thinker a century before the term was coined. Parson's work after emancipation led her directly into conflict with the Ku Klux Klan and into a lifelong partnership with radical typographer and organizer Albert Parsons. She never ceased advocating for racial, gender, and labor justice, all at once -- and she's part of the movement that won us the 8-hour day. Parson's husband, Albert, was one of the orators in Chicago who attracted thousands to a rally near Haymarket Square in 1886 on behalf of worker rights. After police charged the crowd, and a stick of dynamite was thrown, he was one of those arrested and later hanged. Lucy, it was, who led the campaign to exonerate the so-called "Haymarket Martyrs", and then she carried on their work. Leading poor women into rich neighborhoods to confront the rich on their doorsteps, challenging politicians at public meetings and marching on picket lines. She was the only woman of color, and one of only two women delegates - the other being Mother Jones - among the 200 men at the founding convention of the IWW, the militant Industrial Workers of the World. There, she was the only woman to give a speech. She called women the "slaves of slaves" and urged the IWW to fight for equality and charge underpaid women a lower rate for union fees. She also called for the use of nonviolence and "occupation" of the means of production. You can see her principles in the sit-down strikes of the 1930s in Detroit, the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s, and the Occupy movement of today. Parsons died in 1942 in a house fire at the age of 89, but in the celebration of May Day her work endures. Long may her intersectional spirit live."…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Concentrated Media Power is Real Power: We've Let Markets Rule the Public's Airwaves 2:00
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2:00For months we have done our best here at the Laura Flanders Show show to keep it a Trump-free zone. As far as humanly possible we’ve not commented on Donald Trump's rise, his fall, his peaks, or his lows. But maybe just maybe there is something positive that could come of this Trump fiasco. And that's the creeping realization that media critics were right all along. Concentrated media power is real power, and we should worry about it. As James Madison said, "A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both." Or, to put it another way, years in office, climbing the political ladder, are no match for hosting fourteen seasons of the Apprentice. Trumps success with real voters has put the GOP's gatekeepers in a snit. Media bias they cried way way way way too late in the game. But Trump is far from the only dangerous bully puffing himself up on the public's airwaves. His eleven years on NBC isn't close to Bill O’Reilly’s twenty years on Fox. Just like Trump, O'Reilly's never seen a civil rights violation he couldn’t blame on a civil rights victim, or a goat he couldn’t scape. But who cares - only ratings matter in this game. O'Reilly's bosses didn't even blink when O’Reilly, who spends much of his time ranting about derelict parenting by Black parents lost custody of his kids after his daughter told a court she’d witnessed him drag her mother down a staircase by the neck. Only ratings matter. These are the public’s airwaves. And these are the people in whose hands we leave them. That's not a bias problem. That's a power problem. And its exactly what happens when we let markets, not sense, rule.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 This Primary Season: Don't Give In To Panic And Mute 2:02
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2:02Well here we are in my least favorite phase of the election season. The part when pundits and politicians pile on en masse to pull back public aspirations. Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, calls it the "We Shouldn't Even Try" attitude common among establishment Democrats. Ralph Nader calls them “The hereditary Democrat opinion-shapers” who tell their audiences to line up behind experience and electability - as if it’s that or certain death. “This is designed to panic and mute their followers,” says Nader, and all too often it does just that. Think about it — what brings people into the political process? I think of what Progressive Caucus co-chair Keith Ellison said when I asked him if he liked campaigning. I love it, he responded - it’s the time in the year when we talk to our neighbors about their lives and why we care. His eyes lit up. Sure enough, a successful candidate is one like Ellison, the guy who rallies people to believe that the future is about more than fear - and change is possible, in their lives, in their families, in their country. And they can be a part of it. Bernie Sanders has rallied a lot people - just that way — most especially young voters. He’s received 80 plus percent of the youth vote in several states. What happens in elections, is candidates talk to people, eyes bright, promises on their lips. They persuade people they can be powerful, they matter, they’re needed. But what we tend to mean is vote. And after voting, people are expected to cede all their political power back to their political representatives. The panic and mute sets in early in the US system, after the primaries. No wonder the electorate shrinks smaller and smaller. Will Sanders supporters do it? What if they don’t? What if they channeled their energy into building progressive power at the local level? What if they refused to give in to panic and mute? Tell me what you think. Write to me Laura@lauraflanders.com…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Paying for War: Time to Step Up and Stop the Bleeding 2:46
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2:46It’s coming up. April 15th: US Tax Day. Among other things, that’s the day that the Stockholm International Research Institute releases its annual report on world military spending. The number is always mind blowing. But what to do? To back up - for the last few years, the Stockholm reports revealed that the world spends about $1.75 trillion on war. Weapons, planes, bombs, drones. The number’s nowhere near complete because how could you really tally the costs of lifetime care for the wounded and war scarred for example, or the lost time and attention we could have paid to other things. The Stockholm number’s low, but still, tax days a good day to release it, because it reminds us that we are making choices here. Could we think of better ways to spend $1.75 trillion? A couple of years ago the Global Campaign on Military Spending invited people to share their ideas and they came up with plenty. Bernie Sanders has talked about some of them, like free college, on the campaign trail. But that’s the easy part. How to get there? In reality, we’re talking about nations that are armed to the teeth, and rivals for resources and power. How could they ever come together to act for a greater good -- especially if it came at a cost to their pocket book you say? Well, they could, because they have. We had an example just this year. Remember back to the dead of winter, when oil prices were falling and demand was faltering, and people were talking about an economic slowdown? Deep in the heart of it, Iran and Saudi Arabia, two rival oil producers and bitter adversaries cut a deal. They had severed diplomatic relations over the war in Syria. They were fighting a proxy war in Yemen. Short of actually shooting at each other it's hard to imagine worse relations between two countries. And yet, there they were. Brought together by collapsing commodity prices. The Saudis had already cut a deal with Russia. To stabilize oil prices and preserve profits, warring nations were able to step up and stop the bleeding. It worked, a bit. But that's not my main point. If the nations of the world can do it for oil, wouldn’t you think we could do it for blood?…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Easter Rising: Irish Eyes Are On Neoliberalism 2:28
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2:28"We declare the right of the people to the ownership of the land and the unfettered control of our destinies.” Sounds familiar? It's not the US Constitution, it’s the Proclamation signed by Irish rebels 100 years ago this April. In 1916, a few thousand Irish men and women armed with pikes and poorly working rifles took over the center of Dublin and declared a provisional government. Their Republic, they said, would guarantee “the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland." And they pledged to "pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and all of its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government which has divided a minority from a majority.” For a week, armed men and women and kids, with support from local residents, waged an insurrection against British troops. They failed, but the British firebombing of the city, and the sixteen executions that followed, stoked enough anti-English feeling to kick off the process that got Britain booted out of the lion's share of Ireland after seven centuries. The so-called "Easter Rising" in Dublin also sent a message, inspiring anti-imperialists throughout the 20th century, from Gandhi to Lenin to W.E.B. Du Bois, who said, when he heard the rebels called fools, "Would to God some of us had the sense to be fools!" One hundred years on, the irish may be at it again. Successive no-good governments have cut $30 billion from public spending, shredding the safety net and forcing forty percent of children live into poverty. For each person taking up a job, two people of working age are emigrating, according to the Dublin government's own figures. In response, activists are reclaiming that 1916 Proclamation. A broad coalition, convened by labor unions mostly, has pledged to pursue a progressive set of rights, to water, jobs, decent work, housing, health, debt justice, education, democratic reform and the national ownership of the nation's resources. They’re not armed with picks and rifles yet, but they’re already inspiring anti-establishment feeling. The last election left Sinn Fein, the Republican party that dates back to the Rising, the largest opposition party in the South. So what’s next? Who knows. But Irish eyes are worth watching. They’re set on freedom, and not only freedom from the British this time, but from the global neo-liberal empire. Watch out. (Reporting from Ireland for this commentary and related stories received support from the Pulitzer Center for International Crisis Reporting.)…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Happy Easter: Why are Taxpayers Subsidizing Church? 2:04
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2:04Happy Easter everyone! Have you ever noticed how — US Constitution notwithstanding — churches occupy a pretty special place in our society? Just consider the upcoming holiday. If there’s a Christian church in your hood, chances are, you might see a street cleaned up or closed for a parade, or a police officer assigned to mind parishioners. That work’s done by public workers, by the state - which is to say, it’s paid for out of taxes. But religious institutions don’t pay taxes. They’re tax exempt, remember? So who pays? We do. We subsidize the church by paying more than our share, even if we never step foot in a place of worship. Churches don’t even have to apply for tax-exempt status the way the rest of us do by filling out lengthy, complex forms like other nonprofits. Places of worship get non profit status simply by virtue of declaring themselves. They get special dispensation to discriminate too, against women and fire people on moral grounds that wouldn't stand a chance in any other court. The Supreme Court’s currently considering a case, called Friedrichs vs. California Teachers Association, which purports to turn on the question of whether public workers should have to contribute to the union that represents them if those unions engage in political activities the members don't endorse. But you and I subsidize churches every day, whether we like it or not. Lots of congregations provide valuable services, I understand, but we the taxpayers don’t get to choose the soup kitchens over the homophobes… We subsidize both every day. The point is, if you think church and state in the US are happily distinct. Think again. Oh yes, and Happy Easter. You can watch my interview with novelist and activist Sarah Schulman on cities and why we love them, on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at LauraFlanders.com To tell me what you think, write to Laura@lauraflanders.com.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 A Great National Sick-Out - It's Past Time 2:26
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2:26A picture’s worth a thousand words they say, and that was certainly the case earlier this year when public school teachers in Detroit started tweeting out pictures of the crumbling schools they work in. After months of attempting to grab legislators’ attention, the teachers called in sick, en masse earlier this year, causing almost all city schools to close, and while they withdrew their labor, they flooded the social media with images of just what they were so sick of: Broken toilet seats in the students' bathrooms, mushrooms on their classroom walls, leaking ceilings, moldy food. The teachers sent out pictures of something that’s had a hard time getting seen: the social cost of austerity.The teachers secured attention from at least one national candidate - Hillary Clinton who pointed out such conditions wouldn't be tolerated in more affluent places. Majority Republicans in Michigan's Legislature threatened new laws to make it easier to crack down on protesting workers. We’ll see what happens. Meanwhile, it’s worth reviewing how the Detroit schools got into such a fix. The system wasn't always broke. According to analysis by the Citizens Research Council, a Michigan based policy group, the Detroit schools were enjoying a surplus in the 1990s. Now, 41 cents of every dollar appropriated for students is being spent on servicing city debt. Detroit’s very far from the only city’s that’s mortgaged its public assets to pay off private lenders. What’s the cost? It’s not entirely clear. We tend to privatize our problems. What the teachers did was broadcast theirs to the world. Perhaps it’s time for others to snap pictures of their public institutions: their libraries, their schools, their public colleges, their court buildings. What’s austerity look like where you live? We're way past due for a great national sick out. You can watch my interview with Craig Willse and Imani Craig, as well as our latest short documentary on an upstate New York farm that is subverting the school-to-prison pipeline this week on The Laura Flanders Show at LauraFlanders.com and on KCET/LinkTV, FreeSpeech TV and in English and Spanish on teleSUR.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 The Great Corporate Buy-Up: Because of Corporations, Our Cities Are Not Our Own 2:10
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2:10Think you can tell the difference between a city and a business park? It may not be so clear. A corporate buying boom since the financial crash is gobbling up city property and leaving us with places that are literally not our town. Purchasing took off after 2008, when foreclosure rates were high, bank loans were drying up, and record levels of commercial properties were standing vacant. Last year, major acquisitions by corporations topped a $1 trillion in 100 large cities and by major we do mean major – in New York, that’s only counting property-buys of worth $5m or more. The great corporate buy-up is leaving us with more mega projects, more private space, and more people, but less of everything else, most notably, less of everything public, from parks and plazas to elected governance and with all that private space, comes more private police. The reliance on armed private contractors outside of the public command, is not longer only a phenomenon for our Embassies in Kabul and Baghdad. It’s increasingly the norm at home. Angry about police violence? Pushing for more effective community oversight? We may get more and more of that, and less and less police. There are other outcomes too: all that concentration of wealth’s matched by a concentration of poverty. Last year, the Century Foundation Reported that since 2000 the number of people living in high-poverty slums had nearly doubled. The world’s great cities have been places where the poor can make an impact – on the city’s commerce, cuisine, its culture. The poor can’t do that in a business park. As sociologist Saskia Sassen put it recently, the corporate city’s a place where “low-wage workers can work, but not “make”. There are alternative models of development, but first we have to get to know our cities better. Just who owns what? And who’s getting tax breaks? Is the great corporate buy-up really what we want? You can watch my interview with, Aaron Bartley and John Washington of Buffalo Push, about their successful fight for sustainable housing in Buffalo New York this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at LauraFlanders.com. To tell me what you think, write to Laura@LauraFlanders.com.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Dark Money: What Might The Money Media Cover If They Weren't Covering Trump? 2:22
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2:22Dark Money, Super PACs, shady multi-millionaires buying your democracy. When Americans were asked recently what they fear most, it wasn’t terrorists (unless you mean the sort that take over your TV at election time.) It was corruption of government officials. It’s that fear that a certain multi-millionaire megalomaniac is playing into when he says "I’m so rich I can’t be bought - so vote for me." So is voting for a billionaire to protect you from rule by billionaires a sensible way to fight money in politics? Not exactly. It just looks that way on TV. Is today's election auction normal or inevitable? Neither. A handful of Supreme Court decisions, decided by a single vote unloosed the cash-flow. It’s happened mostly over the last ten years. As the Brennan Center reported this January, just one justice shifting opinion could speedily restore common sense limits on big spending. Change won't come easily. In the last quarter century, the share of political contributions traceable to the top hundredth of Americans has doubled - from 15 percent to 30 percent. Excess corporate cash rushes into every Congressional and State House office in the land. Concentration of wealth is the problem. Corruption is the consequence. But it’s just not true there’s nothing regular Americans can do. Reformers in California are gathering signatures to put a Voters Bill of Rights on the ballot next November that would require TV ads to display their top donors clearly - and overhaul the state’s campaign finance database to make tracking special interests easier. California’s measure could send a message - even to the justices. Similar efforts are underway in Maine and Washington and South Dakota. But paying more attention to people making change would require money media to pay just a little less attention to that billionaire. You can watch my interview with Gwendolyn Hallsmith, author of Vermont Dollars, Vermont Sense, this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at LauraFlanders.com READ MORE: https://www.votersrighttoknow.org https://blogs.chapman.edu/happenings/2015/10/14/what-do-americans-fear/…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 SCOTUS Case Friedrichs is a Trojan Horse - Let's Talk Real Freedom in the Workplace 2:06
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2:06The Supreme Court is considering the most important labor case in years. Friedrichs vs. California Teachers Association, ostensibly addresses public workers rights on the job, specifically their right not to support their union. The plaintiffs argue that the sum they pay to the union that represents them violates their free speech and free association rights. In their view, they shouldn’t have to give money to a union whose political actions they oppose - even if there’s already a process for opting out of those activities — it’s all about freedom, they say. Many have pointed out that “free speech" in this case is cover for an attack on collective bargaining — people together doing what they can’t do individually. The ramifications of all those lost contributions on public workers unions, and public workers - are obvious. But if the justices really want to tal about freedom in the workplace -- let's go there. Most workers have no freedom when it comes to hours or wages or working conditions. Many are told what to wear and what to do; even when they may go to the bathroom. In a capitalist system, you could say individuals are free to take a job or quit it. But in a work-or-die economy, there’s not much free choice involved. If you want real democracy in the workplace. You can build that, as we hear from the people on this program who are involved in worker owned enterprises and cooperatives. where every worker has a say. But if you want real democracy in the workplace, you have to democratize ownership, Friedrichs is a Trojan Horse attack on unions and collective bargaining. But a real national conversation about freedom in the workplace? We could go there. A whole lot of people working for a new and different economic system would say -- Bring it on. You can watch our interview with Janelle Orsi and Mickey Metts on building the commons on the Internet on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at LauraFlanders.com To tell me what you think, write to Laura@lauraflanders.com.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 We're Still Moving Forward - On Authoritarianism and Angels in America 2:32
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2:32Half way through Tony Kushner’s play, Angels in America, two old Bolsheviks consider the prospect of the future in a scene set in the Kremlin on the verge of the end of the Soviet Union in 1985. "The great question before us is: are we doomed?” says one. “Will the past release us…? “ Thirty years later, as Europeans reel from financial shock, austerity, and the biggest inward migration surge in memory, it’s a question that’s still without an answer. What is clear is that the authoritarianism of the past has yet to release its grip. In 2015 right wing nationalist parties won elections across the continent – from Austria to Poland, Sweden, Turkey and Denmark. Leading the way of course was Hungary, where strong man Viktor Orban has been in office as prime minister since 2010. Orban has a massive majority, just short of two thirds. His only real competition comes from the neo fascist Jobbik movement. To keep ahead of that, he’s used his power to write a new constitution, pack the courts, purge the arts and reign terror on the very poor and anyone he considers an outsider: before the war refugees, it was Jews, gypsies and LGBT people. Forward or back? The last time I saw Angels In America was in Budapest in 2013. There, that Kremlin scene, played out in what felt like a very contemporary context. Playing Prior Walter, Kushner’s outspoken, cross dressing, openly gay lead, was Robert Alfoldi, an outspoken, gay, cosmopolitan Jew who’d just been ousted from his job as director of Hungary’s National Theater to be replaced by an Orban appointee who had sworn to return the theater to its Hungarian roots and make the National a “sacred space.” Cut to the end of the play. “The world only spins forward,” said Alfoldi as Walter speaking unmistakably for all outsiders. “We will be citizens. The time has come”. For every night of the run, the normally reserved Hungarian audience, rose clapping in unison, to give the play, Alfoldi, and the future a rousing ovation. It’s a long piece, which ends with the words “The Great Work Begins.” Kushner’s right. The great work of forward over backward isn't easy. Nor is it over, yet. You can watch my interview with Angels in America author, Tony Kushner, this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at LauraFlanders.com. To tell me what you think, write to Laura@LauraFlanders.com.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Who Cares if Hillary is Warm? I Care About Her Wars 2:15
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2:15Primary season is in its prime and feels familiar in almost every respect. Eight years on, it’s the same candidate, the same point of contention. Is Hillary Clinton warm enough? I’m not debating that this is sexist stuff: all this focus on her warmth, her style, her smile. Come on. Why do women always have to be warm anyway? Was Lincoln warm? Was Eisenhower? It’s just another double standard. The partisan press corps is packed with macho creeps. I agree. When it comes to Clinton, it’s not the warmth, it’s the wars I’m worried about. I’ve actually read her books, both of them, and I don’t think she’s ever seen a bombing mission she didn’t approve, going back to the 1990s, when the whole insidious “humanitarian” war idea took root with NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia. Bernie Sanders voted for that bombing too, so he should score no points from peaceniks on that account. Still, it really is pretty rich for Hillary Clinton to pose as the great anti-gun and anti-violence crusader when you think of how the humanitarian war idea’s played out. Killing people to save people? Bringing democracy at the end of a rocket? Backing rebels we know next to nothing about. It’s been almost unending intervention and war since the Clintons let that particular genie out of the bottle. It was the wars on Yugoslavia that prepared the political ground for intervention in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and every one of those has led to a bloodbath and, as of now a dangerous, failed state. Clinton’s coming on strong against the gun lobby and the NRA but US arms sales never did better than when she was Secretary of State. She approved what was at the time the largest ever US arms sale to scary Saudi Arabia, even as she acknowledged in Wiki-leaked cables, that that country was world’s leading source of support for Sunni terrorist groups. Warmth? As far as I’m concerned Clinton’s shown way too much of it -- to wars and warmongers. And if what you're really worried about is machismo, ask the women of those failed states -- from the Taliban to ISIS - they've been the first to pay the price. You can watch my interview with, actor artist, musician Viggo Mortensen on the looming anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and the price we pay for silence, this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at LauraFlanders.com. To tell me what you think, write to Laura@LauraFlanders.com.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Wealth Isn't Colorless or Gender Free: Capital and Intersectionality 2:20
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2:20Capital is intersectional says guest Zillah Eisenstein on The Laura Flanders Show this week. People with bodies labor, which means that the capital they produce is immersed in race and gender. Just like the bodies that make it, wealth’s not colorless or gender free. Anyone who pretends otherwise just isn’t serious about reducing inequality. With gender equality more of a priority than ever, women still represent seventy percent of the world’s poor, according to the UN. They earn less than men (about half as much, even in advanced economies), even as they do more work (almost two and a half times as much when you include unpaid labor), and inequality between rich and poor women isn’t shrinking, it’s growing. In the US, a 2011 study found that fully forty percent of single female heads-of-households were living in poverty and the numbers for women of color were even worse. Sure the rise of extremism, war and the concentration of financial and corporate power hasn’t helped. Still, in the same two decades, women have gained legal rights, rights they can defend in court. More girls have gone to school. More women have gotten elected and become leaders. Today’s inequalities can’t be explained simply by lack of legal rights or discrimination, says the UN. Nor are they inevitable. What we know from our guests – women like Ai Jen Poo of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and Saru Jaraman of the Restaurant workers -- is that equality hasn’t come from access to more precarious and poisonous jobs. An ever-expanding workday in the “gig economy” is not the answer either. What’s needed is fundamental change – what many are calling The Next New System. And that’s got to come with explicit attention to racial and gender justice. In 2016, the Laura Flanders Show will be producing a series of special reports on Race, Gender and the Next Economy with our friends at the Democracy Collaborative. Tell us what you think. If capital’s intersectional, what’s our intersection transformation look like? And where do you see it happening? You can watch my interview with Zillah Eisenstein on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at the LFSHOW.org To tell me what you think, write to Laura@theLFSHOW.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
The market is magic, say capitalism's admirers but some that magic is pretty dark. Just look at what it's done to art and the art market. What once inspired generosity now feeds off its exact opposite - inequality and there's no reason art buyers or sellers should ever want to turn it back. I thought about this reading Molly Crabapple's bold, passionate book, Drawing Blood. “Pens can't take on swords she says, let alone Predator drones.” But the best art can inspire generosity. To make her point she tells a story about Picasso. In 1937 when Picasso's Guernica was shown, it was heroic not just for its heart-rending depiction of civilians slain in the government bombardments of the Spanish Civil War - but in the effects of the Guernica exhibition. To get in, in 1937, the price viewers had to pay was a pair of boots to be sent to the Spanish front. The gallery gathered 15 thousand pairs. Fast forward to today and the prime effect of the high-end art market is to encourage hoarding. Take one Picasso. In 1997, and the price paid for a Picasso at auction was almost $32 million. In 2015, the price paid for the same piece was $179 million, also at auction. The price soared because there were that many more bidders. As the New York Times Upshot columnist explained, the number of people who could easily afford to pay $179 million for a Picasso had increased more than fourfold in less than two decades. Those same decades have seen all but the very top fall further and further behind. The top 1 percent's pulled away from the 99. The top 0.01 and 0.001 percent from the one percent. If wealth's concentrated at the top there's less of it to spread about. The bombs hitting regular civilians these days in places like Greece and Spain are financial not ferrous metal - but austerity is today's civil war. The market discourages generosity. All that wealth is purely relational. Once it's a commodity - art's value is measured in the price someone's willing to pay for it. That means the $179 million buyer - if he ever wants to sell at a profit - is banking on the top fraction pulling ever further ahead of the rest. So there you have it - from giving boots to giving the poor the boot. In not quite a century. Welcome to the dark magic of the art market.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Laissez Faire Capitalism - That Is Anything But 2:52
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2:52“Laissez faire” capitalists love to argue that the market itself is magic. You don’t need government or regulation to rein in bad companies -- consumers will do it. The principle involved is called “reputation”. It’s amazing how vigorously, then, some governments will get involved to defend bad companies from shame. Several years ago, activists in North America, Europe and Israel, began campaigning for a boycott of companies based in occupied territory. Among those is the Israeli Ahava Corporation. In the US, women organized by CodePink started showing up at Ahava stores dressed in bikinis daubed in mud. It’s not pretty to be predatory, the women of the Stolen Beauty campaign said: while Ahava’s packages say their skin creams come from the Dead Sea, Israel, the mud actually comes from a site inside occupied territory; it’s manufactured into cosmetics in an illegal settlement deep within the occupied West Bank. While Ahava’s using Palestinian resources without permission or compensation, Palestinians themselves are denied access to the Dead Sea’s shores -- although one-third of the western shore of the Dead Sea lies in the occupied West Bank. For years, the European Union’s been considering what to do about this and as you can imagine, they’ve come under withering attack. This fall, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayhu went all out and accused the Europeans of singling out Israel. He invoked the Holocaust and threatened to shun a series of high level meetings. The rhetorical onslaught worked to the extent that instead of a boycott, the Europeans opted for labelling. Under this plan, products made in occupied territory will bear labels that include the term “Israeli settlement,” while Palestinian products will be labelled “product from the West Bank (Palestinian product),” “product from Gaza,” or “product from Palestine.” The labeling will be mandatory for fruit and vegetables, wine, honey, olive oil, eggs, poultry, organic products, and cosmetics, and voluntary for industrial products and processed foods. It’s tepid, but it's better than anything the US government’s has done so far. The Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign continues. Truth in labelling’s at least a start. Now if only we could get the “laissez faire” label removed from laissez faire capitalism. There's nothing laissez faire about it. You can see my interview with reporter Antony Loewenstein on his latest book Disaster Capitalism, Making A Killing Out Of Catastrophe this week on the Laura Flanders Show on LinkTV, FreeSpeech TV and in English and Spanish on TeleSUR , and find all our archives at TheLFShow.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 The Solution Isn't Kindler, Gentler Prison 3:35
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3:35What got a person locked up – no matter what - in 1790? Piracy. Period. At the birth of the republic mandatory minimum sentences were a rare and targeted thing. Attacking and robbing ships at sea got you life, no ifs, ands or buts. What gets you a mandatory minimum sentence today? Any one of 261 different crimes. Princeton professor Naomi Murakawa took a look, for her book, The First Civil Right, How Liberals Built Prison America. There she chronicles how for the first two hundred years, Americans managed to get by with only a handful of mandatory minimum laws. Those governed specific federal crimes. Refusing to testify before Congress would get you a month, bribing a federal inspector six months, forging a US seal got you a year. It wasn’t until the 1980s, that Congress started passing mandatory minimum’s left and right, and we do mean Left and Right. Two terms of tough-on-crime Reagan and Bush Republicans added 72 new mandatory minimum statutes; Clinton’s two terms added 116. Quoting Joe Biden in 1994, Murakawa reminds us of the liberal Democrats’ approach: “The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties… 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the Democratic party is for 124,000 new state prison cells.” This is the period, let’s remember, that saw black-white racial ratios among the imprisoned go from three to one to eight to one. Minimums passed during those years include a mandatory 15 year term for carrying a firearm on a third offence, and a five-year mandatory minimum for possessing five grams of crack cocaine. The number of mandatory minimum crimes tripled between 1985 and 2000, engorging the prison system, and locking up especially women, mostly women with kids. In Murakawa’s book, the list of mandatory minimum statutes on the books today runs to 20 pages. “The perils of post-war liberal law and order are worth recalling now,” she says, when demands for reform are loud but modest in scope. It’s not rocket science why the US has the world’s biggest prison population by far. It’s our policy of imprisoning so many people. The solution’s not kindler, gentler incarceration, or better oversight, it’s an entirely different approach. You can watch my interview with Naomi Murakawa, on the pro-civil rights roots of the US prison state, this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at LauraFlanders.com. To tell me what you think, write to Laura@LauraFlanders.com.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Black workers centers are meeting nationally this month to deepen their ties and strengthen their political power. In a sane world their agenda would be our national agenda: to build assets and access to resources, for the least wealthy Americans. After all, how strong do we want 21st Century America to be? By 2040, we’ll be a majority-minority nation, meaning the majority of us will be living firmly on the wrong side of the racial wealth gap, less wealthy, less secure and more isolated. What difference does wealth make? The Federal Reserve gets at it when, in their annual survey of consumer finances they ask Americans how they’d handle a $400 emergency. Last year, fully 47 percent of respondents said they wouldn’t be able to cover it, or only by selling something or borrowing money. That’s wealth: that extra beyond your income, what’s coming in and going out, that helps you cover a crisis. Let alone invest in the future. Almost half of all Americans don’t have any of it. Add race to the picture and it’s even more disturbing. The Fed reports that the racial wealth gap’s barely changed over the last 25 years, except it grew following the Great Recession. Between 2007 and 2013 net worth for white families rose from roughly 5 to roughly seven times greater than Black family worth. In absolute terms, mean net wealth stands $134,000 for white families and just $11,000 for black. While incomes were only between one and two times greater for whites than for blacks, assets were roughly five times as great, for those with bachelor degrees. And the inequality doesn’t stop there. The Fed asks about inheritances – lump sum surprises that help families accrue wealth. 23% of white families compared to just 11 percent of black ones have ever received an inheritance. Only 6 % of blacks expect ever to inherit wealth as opposed to 19 percent of whites. The numbers for Hispanics are even lower. Suffice to say, today the top 10 % of white families hold 90 percent of the nation’s total wealth while black families hold a mere 2.7 percent. What the Black Workers Centers in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago and elsewhere are doing: doubling down on securing wages, expanding access to contracts and capital, and exploring creative ways to build assets for the black working class. With, or without, but especially with a non-white future looming, isn’t that actually what we should be doing as a nation? You can watch my interview with Lola Smallwood Cuevas of the Los Angeles Black Workers Center, this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at LauraFlanders.com. To tell me what you think, write to Laura@LauraFlanders.com.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 What Do 19th Century African Statues Have to Do with COP21? 2:17
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2:17The heads of 19th century African states, when they found their authority bypassed by colonial traders and their land and people savaged by powers beyond their control, sought to reassert their authority by erecting scary little statues with the community's rules literally nailed into their chest. "Thou shalt not kill", "thou shalt not steal". Every pledge made by the Kongo people was marked by a spike for all to see. The gods would punish transgressors, the priests of the Chiefs promised, and the magic potion used to summon the spirits was buried in the statue's stomach. Some of those statues, called minkondi have been on display at the Metropolitan Museum this fall, and I couldn't help thinking of them as the UN meets for the 21st time to draft an agreement to defend the climate. Like those long-ago Kongo chieftains, the leaders of today's nation-states are finding their countries colonized by corporations, and they're doing their best to re-assert their authority. But if, after 21 meetings, they finally agree on a document will it be any more effective than the Minkondi? Determined, muscular, with knees bent, ready to jump, those little guys looked scary and protective too, but they weren't. They marked the desperate last gasp of an old way of life - and now they're behind glass. When we paid homage to the Minkondi at the Met recently - I couldn't help noticing that the magic potion in their bellies was all dried up, but the source of their power lay not in the priests or the chieftains or that potion, but in the people - specifically in the traditional belief that anti-social behavior was wrong and would be punished. As my partner on that visit said, the first time a transgressor got away with injuring the group without incurring consequences, the jig was up. All these years on, two centuries of no-consequences have brought us to the brink of climate catastrophe. Can we learn from the Kongo? Nail as many hammers and spikes as you like into our chest - nothing substitutes for a living, breathing social contract. You can watch my interview with Los Angeles organizer and educator Eric Mann this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at LauraFlanders.com. To tell me what you think, write to Laura@LauraFlanders.com.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 This Thanksgiving Think Food Power, Not Food Pantries 2:02
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2:02During his historic address to Congress, Pope Francis called out Dorothy Day. Scurrying to figure out why, reporters duly described Day as the co- founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, which feeds and houses the urban poor. It may take her being canonized to fill in the whole picture. Day was also a pacifist, a radical journalist, a socialist, a single mom. Her life story would make for a good superhero movie. In the meantime, it’s worth pointing out that decades before the crisis of today, Day named our economy as the number one threat to the planet and people, to which she proposed alternatives: not charity but food power. "It may be a sentimental notion," she wrote in 1925, "but I think it would be wonderful to live entirely off the land and not depend on wages for a livelihood." Famous for shelters – she called them "houses of hospitality" -- Day was clear that soup lines weren’t the answer to poverty. The “real step,” she wrote, were farms. In the thirties, inspired on a trip South to organize tenant farmers, Day founded Maryfarm, in northeast Pennsylvania which she hoped would become the heart of her movement. The city’s streets pulled her away, but her belief in farming stuck: "I still think that the only solution is the land," Day wrote in 1957. She remained committed to organizing and was arrested in her seventies with striking Farmworkers in California. As Thanksgiving rolls around and many - even in the media - are struck with the urge to do do something for the poor, it's worth remembering that at least as far as Dorothy Day was concerned, it's not food pantrys that will change things. It's workers with rights, autonomy and food power. You can watch my interview with Jalal Sabur and Ray Figueroa on food power to unearth the school to prison pipeline, this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at LauraFlanders.com. To tell me what you think, write to Laura@LauraFlanders.com. http://ncronline.org/news/peace-justice/its-time-rediscover-dorothy-days-voice-land…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 If You're An Activist, Free Information Will Cost You 2:06
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2:06Just because it’s called the Freedom of Information Act, doesn’t mean the information is free. In fact, if you’re an activist or a journalist trying to investigate the police, chances are it’s going to cost you, as reporters discovered last year when they tried to obtain documents pertaining to the police killing in Ferguson of Michael Brown. In their efforts to report the story, reporters were being charging exorbitant fees for records that are supposed to be released to the media for free. Missouri has an open records law, yet according to the Associated Press, news agencies were being charged thousands of dollars, “nearly ten times the cost of a government employee's salary" to retrieve government records. Price gouging is one heck of an effective way to stall and stymie public oversight. As our guest, Hamid Khan of the LA Coalition against Spying points out, this city price gouging is going on just as surveillance is sprawling. The Intercept reported this July that the Department of Homeland Security has been monitoring Black Lives Matter activists, their Facebook, Twitter and social media accounts, and their meetings, since the first days after the killing of Brown. You only need to watch Stanley Nelson’s new documentary about the government’s deadly assault on the Black Panther’s to see how history could repeat. The best antidote to heat is light. In an attempt to expose this movement surveillance - and I suspect make a point about Freedom of Information that’s not so free - the online activist group, Color of Change is launching a fundraising push. Unlike the well funded Intercept, which used FOIA requests to obtain documentation of spying, activists don’t tend to have the money to find out if they’re being spied on. You can help. You can watch my interview with Hamid Khan about his work with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at LauraFlanders.com. To tell me what you think, write to Laura@LauraFlanders.com. Links: https://theintercept.com/2015/07/24/documents-show-department-homeland-security-monitoring-black-lives-matter-since-ferguson/ https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/expose-the-fbi?refcode=aliciagarzafulluniverse&amount=15.00…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Money Media Cover Change Makers Most When They're Dead 2:41
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2:41It’s amazing how money media cover activists when they die. When radical philosopher and organizer Grace Lee Boggs passed away on October 5, she received long, respectful obituaries in just about every paper. "Activist and revolutionary", "trail blazer", "human rights advocate". Boggs, it was noted, lived to 100 years old. But it shouldn’t take a century for the media to notice Bogg’s ilk - the activists in their hometowns. "People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative,” wrote Boggs. “We need a vision that recognizes that we are at one of the great turning points in human history when the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values." In money media that vision is sorely lacking. When they cover community organizing at all, profit driven media tend to focus only on the troublemakers – the sit-ins, shutdowns and picket lines. But while activism is often used to extract concessions from government, organizers like Boggs don't just make trouble - they make change. At The Laura Flanders Show, we have the great privilege of meeting up close the people and organizations that are developing sophisticated ways, not just to stand up to power, but to build and use power, and use it differently. Take Boggs in Detroit, the most radical thing she ever did, she said, was to stay, and create programs that build a sense of pride and ownership among local people through planting gardens and painting murals. In Buffalo, New York, the group PUSH Buffalo combines political campaigning with capacity building so local residents can renovate abandoned houses to the latest standards once they win control. In the Rockaways and Central Brooklyn, New York, we’ve reported on The Working World’s co-op academy, which teaches working people the basics of businesses planning and raising capital. And as we’ve reported here, residents all over New York are learning a thing or two about priority setting, as they participate in local budgeting. November 9-15 is New Economy Week, five days of events and publications focused on transforming society. They’ll be lifting up visions, but also concrete models. It wouldn’t require so much imagination if only the media looked around. You can watch my interview with Matthew Stinchcomb,and Donna Schaper about the craftsmarket Etsy's latest venture, this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at LauraFlanders.com. To tell me what you think, write to Laura@LauraFlanders.com.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 A Long Forty Seconds: Mohammed el Gharani and Habeas Corpus 2:50
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2:50Mohammed el Gharani was one of the youngest detainees ever held at Guantanamo Bay. At the age of fourteen he was abducted, imprisoned and subjected to torture – a non person in America’s non prison camp. Close to eight years later, never having been charged or tried, he was released. But like all men who’ve been locked up in Guantanamo, Mohammed el Gharani is barred for life from ever entering the USA. This fall, the artist and thought provoker Laurie Anderson, brought him here anyway. And as significant as that border crossing was for el Gharani, it turned out to be just as important for Americans. For three days this October, Anderson arranged for el Gharani to be beamed in via satellite, from West Africa where he lives with his wife and children, into the huge former Drill Hall of New York’s Park Avenue Armory. There he sat, projected onto an enormous white chair almost the size of the Lincoln Memorial. A living, talking, tele-presence. “Many people have told my story… Now I have the opportunity to speak for the first time,” said el Gharani. When he was ordered released, judge Richard J Leon, described the government’s case against el Gharani as a“mosaic” of unfounded allegations” including one that he’d been an Al Qaeda operative in London -- at eleven years old. Collaborating with Anderson was el Gharani’s first chance to talk with an American who wasn’t his interrogator. He then got a chance to meet scores more, as the Drill Hall filled with people who stayed, some for hours, just sitting and lying on the ground, in his company. Every so often, a camera was opened up for el Gharani’s New York visitors. Shyly then eagerly, they stepped into the light, to communicate with him back in Africa. Because of the long distance, and a 40 second delay in transmission, talking was impossible and so lots of people waved. Or mouthed I’m sorry. One woman, hand on her chest, lifted up tear-soaked eyes. A dreadlocked young man about el Gharani’s age, raised a fist. Forty seconds is a long time for a peace sign to travel half way around the world. The woman with the tears in her eyes had walked away by the time el Gharani brought his fingertips together into a heart. Forty seconds is a long time. But it’s not as long as 14 years of justice denied. We need to close Guantanamo and to bring its victims closer. We all, it turns out, have a lot to say. You can watch my interview with Laurie Anderson about Working with former Guantanamo prisoner, Mohammed el Gharani, this this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at LauraFlanders.com. To tell me what you think, write to Laura@LauraFlanders.com.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Who's Leading The Charge for Change? Women 2:19
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2:19Towards the end of the new movie, This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein, author of the book that inspired the film, notices something about who’s leading the charge for change. They come from sacrifice zones, the very same places the powers that be have written off for environmental or ecological devastation. There’s another thing about those leaders too. From Beijing to Montana to the Alberta Tar Sands, those in the front lines of resistance are women. In one stirring scene, Indian grandmothers plant themselves in front of the filmmaker’s car, refusing to let it pass until they’re sure its bound for the village not the nearby coal mine. In another, a Chinese filmmaker asks her daughter if she’s ever seen blue sky and the film of the encounter attracts millions of viewers in a week. There’s Naomi, too, of course. In her book, she touches on her struggle to get pregnant and her suspicions about pollution. My point though, isn’t that female biology explains female behavior. I don’t believe it. But women’s experiences are relevant. I think women are in the forefront of the struggle against sacrifice zones because women and those seen as female, know a thing or two about being sacrificed. Take right now. Every armed force from ISIS to the UN seems to agree that women’s bodies can be sacrificed for the purposes and pleasure of soldiers.So too, women’s work. A new McKinsey study reports that women are still doing 75 percent of the unpaid work around the world. In the U.S. alone, that adds up to $1.5 trillion in value each year - sacrificed. All too often our lives and life-chances are just too inconvenient to mention. When Pope Francis on his trip to the US, met for a moment with an opponent of marriage equality - it caused a firestorm. The fact that he was surrounded the entire time by men and an institution that opposes female equality - was met with a respectful hush. "Women," as Barbara Kruger so famously said, "your body is a battleground." So It’s no surprise we know a thing or two about sacrifice zones -- and for that matter, about resistance. You can watch my interview with Avi Lewis, Director of This Changes Everything, Capitalism vs. the Climate, this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at LauraFlanders.com. To tell me what you think, write to Laura@LauraFlanders.com. http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/growth/how_advancing_womens_equality_can_add_12_trillion_to_global_growth…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
The State of California recently conceded that its policy of keeping prisoners in isolation demanded an overhaul. Now can we overhaul our system of isolating prisons? As the prison activists and lawyers who forced California to change made clear, human beings are social animals. Isolation breaks spirits and souls and minds. So too, isolating our prisons from the centers of our body politic, breaks our society’s connection to the institutions our social systems have created. As MacArthur Genius award winning public defender Bryan Stevenson writes, he was already a lawyer before he met his first death row inmate. The fight against social segregation stopped too soon. We came to accept that isolation and segregation were wrong for homes and schools, so how come we cart our prisoners off to the most remote places we can find? As Bryan Stevenson’s grandmother , the daughter of slaves told him, “You can’t understand most of the important things in life from a distance. You have to get close.” At this point, the state of New York’s incarceration system’s less about justice than about distributing public money from downstate to up. It’s a development scheme. But the social cost of this removal is measured in the invisibility of people in prison – from our consciousness. Changing the status quo sometimes seems impossible, but it’s made more so by how intangible it is – when the people caught up in it - both prisoners and staff – so rarely actually talk to us, the voters who permit mass incarceration to continue. When we sentence offenders, we assumes that every one is the community is a victim. Hence all that “The State vs. Jane Doe" and "The People vs. “ language. How about we be consistent. 2.3 million in prison, 6 million on probation and parole. We’re shooting, gassing, hanging and electrocuting hundreds of people and keeping more languishing on death row. We’re the only country in the world that locks up kids in isolation. We make terrible mistakes. Mostly permitting race, poverty and illness to lead to death - or lock up for life. Proximity could change this, as Stevenson’s grandmother said. We need to break ourselves, not just our prisoners, out of isolation. You can watch my interview with Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy, this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at lauraflanders.com.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Gaza and Ferguson: Security Forces that Stink - Literally 3:09
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3:09What do Gaza and Ferguson have in common? Security forces that stink. I mean it literally. Thanks to Missouri’s open records law, it has been confirmed that the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department is one of a slew of US city police forces to add a new Israeli crowd control spray to their arsenal. The spray, called skunk, is a vile smelling liquid that an Israeli company called Odortec has developed with the help of the Israeli military. Israel’s so-called Defense Forces have been firing skunk on Palestinians – trying it out -- since 2008. A professor I know who got skunked in Gaza this summer, described the smell as a mix of sewage and excrement and rotting flesh – impossible to wash off – even after weeks back home. An Israeli spokesperson told the BBC it’s a non-lethal non-toxic alternative to bullets and pepper spray. It’s “100 percent eco-friendly” too.” That doesn’t mean it’s friendly. Human rights groups have video tape of Israeli water cannon soaking fields and farms and homes with skunk. Now it’s here. Mistral Security, a firm based in Bethesda, sells skunk in fire extinguisher or grenade form, and also in “Bulk Skunk”– “264 gallon barrels to treat large areas in a very short period of time.” “Applications include, but are not limited to, border crossings, correctional facilities, demonstrations and sit-ins,” says Mistral. The stench of all this confirm the thesis of a new book by Jeff Halper, whom I first met two decades ago in the hills above Jerusalem, where he was directing the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. Wars between states are largely a thing of the past, he write in his book War Against the People. What’s needed now are the counter-insurgency weapons and Israel leads the world in those. For skunk, there is an antidote soap – the St. Louis PD has bought a good amount of it already. But is there an antidote for what Halper calls the globalization of Palestine? That’s what we need. You can watch my interview with Tim Wise, author of Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich and Sacrificing the Future of Americ,a this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at LauraFlanders.com. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@LauraFlanders.com. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34227609 http://www.mistralsecurityinc.com/Our-Products/Crowd-Control-Skunk http://www.dailydot.com/politics/skunk-spray-us-police-mistral-security/?tw=dd…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Why Are Our War Criminals Still Walking Free? 3:02
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3:02If the Guatemalans can send their war criminals to jail, why are ours still walking around? It just so happened I was reading Greg Grandin’s new biography of Henry Kissinger while the news was breaking in Guatemala. After thirty years of civil war, and many years since in which killers have transitioned seamlessly from being murderers to making money – and staying in power. Guatemalans said no more. For months, they held mass protests demanding prosecutions in a corruption scheme that rigged trade deals for kickbacks and robbed one of Latin America’s poorest nations of millions. This August hundreds of thousands of people from all sectors of Guatemala’s very divided society surrounded the National Palace and refused to leave until Congress voted to strip Molina of immunity from prosecution. Which the Congress did, on fear of being on the wrong side of an angry populace just weeks before a national election. What sent President Perez Molina and a slew of his cronies to jail was a mountain of financial and banking evidence. But what kept people in the streets was Molina’s history in the military. As a young commander, he’d led an Army unit in a particularly brutal region,that saw tens of thousands slaughtered – mostly by the military- in the civil war. Impunity corrodes democracy they said. We can’t call ourselves a functioning democracy when we oligarchs evade the rule of law. Molina was just settling into his jail cell this September as Chileans marked the 42nd anniversary of the Coup that Henry Kissinger helped to mastermind. Kissinger’s gotten away with murder there, as well as in Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia, Southern Africa, Indonesia, Iran. His shadow extends over today’s devastated Middle East, writes Grandin. And still he’s walking around free and smug at 92. As one columnist put it, “Guatemala finally lost its patience.” What the heck explains ours? You can watch my interview with Greg Grandin, author of Kissinger’s Shadow this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at lauraflanders.com. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@lauraflanders.com.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
BP‘s settlement for the Deepwater Horizon spill was great headline-grabbing news recently. Five Gulf coast governors as well as the US Attorney General took the opportunity to claim glory for the largest settlement with a single entity in American history. But who’s in deep water for the Deepwater? Beneath the headlines, it looks as if we are. In case you missed it, under terms announced July 2, British Petroleum agreed to a record-breaking $18.7 billions to resolve claims related to the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Five states stand to gain from payouts over the next 18 years: Louisiana will receive approximately $6.8 billion according to Governor and GOP presidential candidate Bobby Jindal. In her announcement, A.G. Loretta Lynch declared that ever since the spill the Justice Department has been “fully committed to holding BP accountable” and to restoring the environment and the economy of the region “at the expense of those responsible and not the American taxpayer." But if that’s what the DOJ’s committed to, it’s not exactly what they got. As we’ve mentioned before, when corporations agree to pay out compensation, they can claim a tax deduction. Restitution, unlike a criminal penalty or fine, can be written off as just another “cost of doing business”. Of that $18.7 billion, the Justice Department seems only to have tied $5.5 billion to criminal Clean Water Act violations. The rest will likely be tax-deductible, even though a New Orleans judge ruled BP guilty of gross negligence. $18.7 billion is a hefty sum, but its one that the public will largely be on the hook for. It seems to suggest that bad behavior can lead to just another windfall. No wonder that five years after the Gulf of Mexico disaster, a Southern California coast was coated in crude oil. If the DOJ had seized BP’s assets and taken over control, now that might have sent a real message. You can watch economist Richard Wolff and Dr. Cornel West discuss corporate capitalism and white supremacy this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at GRITtv.org. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Cheney, Bush, Give Your Home To a Refugee 2:25
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2:25Waterfront sunsets, oysters, cool breezes on white sails. I hope the Bushes and the Cheneys enjoyed their long vacation, because now it is time for them to hand over their vacation homes to refugees. I know, you didn’t think your war would touch your mansions, but as Donald Rumsfeld once said, “Stuff happens.” This particular stuff is your fault. Plenty of people knew the invasion and occupation of Iraq would break a region and unleash a nightmare. From a thousand cruise missiles and $18 billion in arms sales, what did you think would come? What’s coming, says the United Nations is at least 850,000 people, fleeing war in Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and sub-Saharan Africa. They’d rather be home too. You bear responsibility and you have the room. The Bush family already had two mansions in Kennebunkport. Governor Jeb just built a third. Misters Rumsfeld and Cheney enjoy private resorts on the Chesapeake bay. It’s time they gave up their private decks and rolling lawns. Iraqi women fleeing ISIS would appreciate Rumsfeld's manor house on a hilltop called Mount Misery. They know the real thing. The Cheney’s could house a village or two at their ranch in Jackson Hole. They’d just need to hold their GOP fundraisers elsewhere. In truth, it’s not just the them. This is our world too. Lots of Americans watched the desperate wash up dead in the Mediterranean from the comfort of their second homes this summer. Last year saw a 57 % increase in vacation home buying in the US according to the National Association of Realtors. The number has risen 25 percent since 1989 to some 5.1 million properties today. We hardly use them. Almost half of us take no time off. So how about it? Let’s hand them over. Mine sleeps two. We can squeeze in more. I will if the Bushes will. How about you? Watch musician activist author Boots Riley talk about power music and resistance, this week on The Laura Flanders Show on FreeSpeech TV, Link TV, and in English and Spanish on TeleSUR. And write to me: Laura@lauraflanders.com.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Hi I’m Laura Flanders of GRITtv, for the Progressive Voices channel on Tune-In A year from now we’ll be in the election’s grimmest days; those weeks before the voting when every scrap of dirt that can be hurled at the candidates will have been unearthed, souped up and chucked, and whatever can’t be unearthed will have simply been made up. According to today’s estimates, campaigns are set to spend some $4.4 billion dollars on 2016 political advertising. They call it advertising, but most of those billions will be used to attack. While there’s little evidence that attack ads persuade undecided voters they do have real impact and they create their own credibility – mostly because people in the credibility business talk about them. Be it gossip rumor or slander if enough people are talking about it especially on TV and in the papers, it starts to sound as if it’s true. Take this cycle. There are plenty of reasons to oppose Hillary Clinton. She’s a centrist and a hawk, for starters. But there’s precious little evidence she did anything with her emails that every Secretary before her didn’t do – and the rules she supposedly broke weren’t made until after she left office. As for preserving public records and transparency the GOP hypocrisy is stinking. I don’t blame camp Clinton for screaming to high heaven about Dick Cheney’s energy task force. Still, before you shed real tears for the pols, remember, the name-calling some of the most powerful people in the world are complaining about now, is the same name-calling some far less powerful people feel all the time. You don’t have recall the Witch Hunts, the red scares or the FBI’s co-intell-pro wars to find victims of slander. This time of year also marks the four year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, a national stir that seemed like it could kick off a new grassroots movement, until people with influence cast it as a leaderless mess, mucked up by infighting, and then failed to cover the actual violence of coordinated police raids on defenseless occupiers. Some people are always getting smeared. Consider “juvenile predators”, “welfare queens” and “ illegal aliens” Year in year out, people in power say disparaging, fact free things to serve their own interests. The difference is, in election year, other people in power get upset about it. You can watch my interview with Ellen and Rachel Meeropol, a mother and daughter each seeking change, and my interview with Boots Riley, this week on The Laura Flanders Show at lauraflanders.com.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 An America Without Prisons: It's Been Done Before 2:54
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2:54The state of California agreed in early September to overhaul it's solitary confinement system. With some 3,000 living and breathing people locked up, some of them for twenty or thirty years, in small cells without windows, all but two hours a day — you can bet the system needs overhauling. It actually needs abolishing. As does our mass incarceration system more generally. I know, talk of prison abolition is rarely heard in public, but that doesn’t mean plenty of people aren’t talking about it. Oakland based Critical Resistance is just one example and they’re not alone, not now, and certainly not in US history. The US is an outlier in the so-called civilized world when it comes to writing people off and locking them away. But we’ve only done it for two misbegotten centuries. Go back two hundred years and you’ll find plenty of debate. Colonial jails were tiny wooden buildings - like the one that’s been standing on Cape Cod since 1690 - which housed people just until they were tried. Incarcerating people for punishment only came later. Solitary, Ironically, was the brainchild of the Quakers, the same people who pushed to abolish slavery. They imagined solitary reflection as a humane alternative to stocks and whipping. Even at that time, though, there were places with no prisons. When Pope Francis passes through Central Park, he’ll pass the site of Seneca Village, a village settled by free blacks and Irish immigrants in the 1820s. According to the NY Historical society Seneca Village had three churches, a school, several cemeteries - and no prison - until it was razed for the park. After the Civil War - those hundreds of towns founded by freed slaves had schools and churches and music halls but not prisons. Anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston described one of those Eatonville, Florida where she grew up, as a city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred black skins; 300 good swimmers, plenty of guavas, two schools and no jail house.” Abolition may not be as American as Apple pie, but it’s certainly not a foreign concept and it’s been around a whole lot longer than the prison industrial complex. You can watch my interview with Soros Justice fellow Marlon Peterson, who spent ten years in the New York State Prisons, this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at GRITtv.org To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
There’s US law and then there’s global trade law and if you ever felt inclined to believe that Congress rules the roost, just take a look at the Obama administration's evaporated pledge to take on corporate tax evaders. Obama’s talked for years about shutting down tax havens that let companies re-register overseas in order to avoid paying US taxes. He signed laws and hired new officers. He’s also expressed support for the common-sense No Federal Contracts for Corporate Deserters Act (real name) which would bar companies that evade taxes from getting government contracts. But when the talk hit the walk, the walk hit the skids. Or more precisely global trade rules. According to Bloomberg News (www.accountingtoday.com/news/tax-prac…-75113-1.html), when one of the nation’s largest re-registered companies argued that barring contracts violated World Trade Organization non-discrimination law, the administration seems to have sided with the manufacturer. In a move that goes by the confusing term "inversion," the company in question, Ingersoll Rand, switched its tax address from New Jersey to Bermuda in 2001 and to tax-friendly Ireland in 2009. And yet, in apparent violation of both Obama's rhetorical pledges and the Corporate Deserters Act, a Homeland Security lawyer cleared Ingersoll Rand for government work last year and the company won another federal contract this May to install energy-saving equipment on U.S. military bases. According to Bloomberg, the White House has declined to comment. And that’s where things stand. Except, the exodus overseas continues. Burger King and the medical device-maker Medtronic Plc recently joined the flow of 50 US companies most of them in the past five years, taking off and taking almost $20 billion in lost tax revenues with them. Many more of these so-called "inversions" are in the works. It’s the global corporations world. We just live in it. And in case you were wondering where, Ingersoll Rand lives. CEO Michael Lamach lives and works in Davidson, North Carolina, al administration office. His compensation jumped 30 percent, to $19.4 million last year on account of company profits surging. (www.bizjournals.com/charlotte/blog/…-good-year.html) You can watch my interview with labor leader Larry Hanley of the International Transit Workers Union this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at GRITtv.org. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 New Orleans’ Deadly Floodwaters Are Now From Gentrification 2:47
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2:47It’s New Orleans remembrance time; that time where, for the last ten years at the end of August, public attention returns for a bit to the city that abandoned its poorest. Poor people clinging to rooftops in the richest nation on earth. The pictures shocked the world and broke our hearts. Mostly black, in a majority black city, democracy failed as spectacularly as the public safety system. Not only the levees, but also the social contract was breached. A decade later, the city’s back. The levees are rebuilt, tourism's thriving and the population's growing, but the social contract lies in shreds. Let’s remember. Hurricane Katrina didn’t destroy New Orleans. The storm’s eye passed to the east. It was the levee breaks that followed that wiped out entire neighborhoods. Public safety systems that had never served all residents well, failed the most vulnerable. A million were displaced, hundreds of thousands lost land and loved-ones. Ten years on, the Census reports that he region’s regained almost 94 of its pre-storm population. New Orleans is almost 80 percent as big as it was. More statistical successes are tallied in graduations rates from new private schools, people housed in new private homes, and patients cured in private hospitals. A sprawling new University Medical Center was scheduled to open this month. But instead of fixing its public accountability problems, the city’s farmed those problems out to private contractors. Got a problem with that school, that house, that hospital? You can protest, but watch out for the cops. The poor black residents who were losing homes and loved ones ten years ago are still losing them, now to gentrification. If you are rich, and like your property prices to rise, it’s good news that house prices are up fifty-eight percent since 2000. An employer? Wages are as low as they get and worker bargaining power has sunk lower than that. A whiter, wealthier city? You’ve got it. Entire neighborhoods have flipped from black to white. But democracy, the principle that societies are held together by a diverse fabric, and being a member of one requires looking after one another? While some communities are still clinging on to their right to have a say in their city, that principle has long ago been left to drown. Money talks, and it has flooded everything -- and not just in the Big Easy. What’s different about the flood of gentrification is there seems to be no shock in it. New Orleans’s recovery numbers look a lot like the rest of the nation’s. Recovery? Whose recovery? City? Whose city? Who’s clinging to your rooftops? You can watch my interview with former New Orleans City Councilmember Oliver Thomas this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and teleSUR and find our half hour documentary, Recovery or Removal at GRITtv.org. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
You can now “unsend” email. Whoop di doop. Forgive me if my enthusiasm is under control. For one thing, “unsend’s” been around for years. Google’s announcement this June was merely that what had been experimental, will now be a built in feature for everybody. Once activated, “unsend” will give Gmail users between 5 and 30 seconds to click "undo send" after firing off an email. The news was sold as a huge relief for all those who’ve ever been caught sending workplace rants directly to their boss, or love notes to the wrong lover. But for those who’ve ever lost a job over a misfired email the new capability will come as cold comfort. There’s no un-do of their unemployment. For those, like the Wall Street employees whose internal emails proved they knew exactly how nefarious the hoaxes and schemes they were a part of were –it’ll make no difference. They’ve mostly gotten away with blowing up the economy without paying a price in any case. For the rest of us, the value of this “unsend” feature lies mostly in its placebo aspect. And that’s not a boon, it’s a danger. Google is still a $368 billion dollar corporation that’s gotten richer than most nations through extracting information wealth from its users – sus without their knowledge. As one former tech insider put it to me, in the empire of Google: a “do not read” feature would be more valuable than “do not send” one.” And that’s not even the worst of it. As many have reported by now, big data’s developed its own unique ways to sidestep or destroy our privacy, labor, civil rights and consumer protections laws. What really needs to be “undone” is not our embarrassing email, it’s the tech giant’s roll-back of the regulations and rules won over the last century. You can watch my interview with Greg Grandin, author of Kissinger’s Shadow, the Long Reach of America’s most Controversial Statesman this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at GRITtv.org. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Almost a year after the 2012 election, Florida congressman Alan Grayson decided to hold a hearing. The number of drone attacks were going up not down; sparse news reports from mostly military sources weren’t making much of an impact on the American public. In October 2013, Grayson decided to invite a Pakistani family who'd experienced an attack themselves, to Capitol Hill to address congress directly. On October 29, they came to Washington, including thirteen year old Zubair who was gravely hurt in a U.S. drone attack on his home community. Zubair had been reluctant to make the journey to the States, for fear he wouldn't be welcomed here, but the strike that maimed Zubair also killed his beloved grandmother, so welcomed or not, he decided it was important to tell the story. "My grandmother and I used to share a love of bright blue skies," he began. The sky in their village of Ghundi was particularly blue on Oct. 24, 2012, the day before Eid, the biggest festival of the year, he explained. He and his grandmother were finishing their work in the fields before celebrating. They could see and hear a drone hovering over their heads but they didn't worry, said Zubair. Quote "Why would I worry? Neither my grandmother nor I were militants." When the drone fired the first time the whole ground shook and black smoke rose up. "We ran but several minutes later, the drone fired again." testified Zubair. He spent Eid as it turned in agony in the hospital. It would take his family months to save for the specialist care that was able to remove the shrapnel from his leg. The drone killed his grandmother in front of him. As Zubair told the legislators: "I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray, and for a short period of time, the mental tension and fear eases… I know that Americans think that drones are the answer,” continued Zubair. "I wish they could understand how I and other children in my community see drones. We used to play outside all the time....now people are afraid to even leave their houses....children have stopped going to the few schools that exist....education isn’t possible as long as the drones circle overhead."... "I hope by telling you about my village and my grandmother, I can convince you that drones are not the answer, concluded Zubair.... And then he added, " I hope I can return home with a message... that Americans listened, that America’s not just drones that terrorize us from above but a country that listens and maybe – just maybe – America may soon stop the drones.".... Was Zubair's trip worth it? Is any body listening? It's been almost two years. What message do you think is getting to his village? We'll post a link to the full transcript of the Rehmans' remarks at our website. You can watch my interview with Andrew Cockburn, author of Kill Chain, this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at GRITtv.org. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Not so long ago, Yale university received a $150 million gift. That looked like a lot until Harvard scooped up $400 million a few weeks later. Both gifts came from Wall Street speculators – Blackstone Group Founder and CEO Stephen Schwarzman and hedge fund executive John S Paulson. Paulson’s donation alone was more money than 98 percent of US colleges have in their endowments, critics pointed out. It shows just how far-reaching inequality has become they said. It also reveals a thing or two about what’s become of our democracy. As economist Richard Wolff’s pointed out, with their charitable contributions Paulson and Schwarzman gave – in the first case to endow an engineering school and in the second to build an arts center (Yale’s third.) But the multi billionaires also took – from us – the general public, because under the law the two can use their gifts to their alma maters to pay less to Uncle Sam. Wolff calculates Schwarzman will save upwards of $75 million –and Paulson way more. As a result, public coffers will be that much poorer. Yale’s already the second richest college in the country. Harvard’s the first. The two elite colleges claim they serve everyone with their scholarship funds. But let's be serious. If as a society we wanted to diminish inequality and unequal access to quality education and opportunity – would we really chose to spend hundreds of millions more on private palaces while public schools cry out for libraries? Probably not, but then again, that’s what makes US capitalism special. We prioritize individual, not government decision making. Unlike those meddlesome socialist societies, we let the self, not the state decide our fate. If such is the way things are, let’s at least tweak the terminology. After a century of anti-stuff, let’s call capitalism what it is: anti-socialism. It’s flat out anti-social and proud of it. You can watch my interview with economist Richard Wolff this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at GRITtv.org. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
The nuclear clock’s still ticking and arms-trading is fuelling a suicidal race. There are a lot of things to fear in the world today. I’d like to suggest that African American women be taken off that list. Not long ago, I had a chance to hear from relatives of Black women killed at the hands of police. In more than half of the cases, those who ended up dying, were in need of help not violence. And yet the killer, an armed police officer, justified his acts on the basis that he feared for his life. Michelle Cusseaux’s mother Frances, said she called her daughter’s mental health facility to check on Michelle who lived alone and seemed in crisis. Instead of help, came cops, and one sergeant in particular who decided to shoot the 5.5 and 130 pounds Michelle in the heart because, he said, he felt threatened, by “the look on her face.” Another of the women killed, a transgender woman called Kayla Moore, was acting oddly and talking to herself, when her roommates called for mental health assistance. Instead of help came multiple police who decided to isolate, restrain and attempt to arrest Kayla, a large woman, by sitting on her. She ultimately suffocated to death. What did the arresting officer say? That Kayla was “seemingly violent”. The stories of Cusseau and Moore and others, are written up in a new report from the African American Policy Forum. “The fact that black women are rarely viewed as women in distress” is literally costing them their lives, the authors write. Instead of in need, black women, even when they’re experiencing a mental health crisis, are perceived as posing a deadly threat. Such is the power of stereotype. Meanwhile, what about the war-mongers, bomb-sellers and weapons hawkers . They scare me half to death. Do you think, if I shot one to the heart, I’d get away with saying I was frightened? There’s “seemingly violent” and then there’s all this death. You can watch an interview with Dr. Helen Caldicott, anti-nuclear campaigner extraordinaire, this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at GRITtv.org. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
“You rape our women and you’re taking over our country,” Dylann Roof is reported to have said as he opened fire on African Americans in Charleston, killing nine. His claim to act in women’s – which is to say white women’s – defense is as old as white male supremacy itself, and it’s been refuted for just as long. Ida B Wells Barnett was the first, debunking lies like Roof’s. Over a century ago, she reported the facts and led the campaign to stop lynching. Jessie Daniel Ames a white single mother of three, responded to the call. Ames founded the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching in 1930, which gathered tens of thousands of signatures on a pledge that read in part: “[P]ublic opinion has accepted too easily the claim of lynchers and mobsters that they are acting solely in defense of womanhood… We dare no longer to permit this claim to pass unchallenged...” White supremacist killers have never stopped using the false pretext of acting in women’s defense. Women of color (as well as men ) have perished as a result, and not just in the US. Not only vigilantes but also our politicians have used the pretext of “protecting” women to defend their imperial wars. In my lifetime alone -- from the invasion of Grenada (to “rescue” white female medical students) to the invasion of Iraq, there’s not been a war that wasn’t waged in “women’s” name, to devastating result on women and men alike. “One thing is for certain: shortly after the invasion of Iraq. There won't be any more mass graves and torture rooms and rape rooms,” Hah. his own global torture regime was just then taking root. The interests white supremacist patriarchal killers serve are their own, their own, their own. Self appointed watchman, George Zimmerman, and killer policemen Daniel Pantaleo, Dante Servin and the rest do not “serve’ or protect people in peril. They put us there, as do our packed prisons and jails, and all the rapacious businesses that make private profits off public pain. Just to be clear: I am not Dylann Roof’s woman. Racist patriarchal violence does not make me safe. It divides me from people I love and tells me lies about who and what actually pose a threat to my life. White female queer, I also know by now that one of white supremacy’s goals is to keep me in my place: silent and separate from my sisters and those with whom I might otherwise make common cause. I refuse. And I am not alone. Women of all colors refute this violence and reject the claim that this killing is in our name. We pledge to act. A statement is right now being finalized. If you want to sign up, write to me laura@GRITtv.org. Thanks.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Own The Change: Building Workplace Democracy One Worker Cooperative At A Time 2:59
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2:59You cannot be what you cannot see, they say. We all saw an economy in crisis a few years ago. Now, in between fear of another crash and pain in a supposed recovery, many Americans are frustrated. Last year, researchers with the Pew Center found that 78 percent of Americans believe that too much power is concentrated in a few huge companies. Sixty two percent believe our current economic system is rigged in favor of the most powerful. But what else is possible? At GRITtv we’ve always been most curious about that. What can everyday people do, not just to survive in the world we know, with its poverty, pollution and war, but to create one with the real food, good fellowship and rewarding livelihoods that make life fabulous. Worker owned cooperatives, where workers are offered a share in the company and a say in decision-making are one way to redistribute economic power. The successful ones have a good track record of reducing inequality and building local asset. But co-ops aren’t easy, and they aren’t for everybody. A year ago, GRITtv and TESA, the Toolbox for Education and Social Action teamed up to look more closely at what it takes for a worker owned cooperative to succeed. The result is Own the Change: Building Economic Democracy One Worker Co-op at a Time a short documentary featuring conversations with worker-owners from Union Cab; Ginger Moon; Arizmendi Bakery, New Era Windows; and more. Own the Change gives an overview of what a worker co-op is, how it can transform lives and communities, and the realities of starting one. In addition to the film, we have created a series of educational resources to be used alongside this documentary. Interested? Just as people creating co-operatives are trying to do business differently, we believe in doing media differently. Would building democracy and working together be easier if our media gave us as many visions of people collaborating as they do of people competing? What if we were encouraged to participate as much we are pushed to purchase? And what if we measured prosperity not by how high we could pile up resources, but how widely we could spread them out? Would our heroes not to mention our politicians look different? Just maybe. See "Own the Change" in full this week on "The Laura Flanders Show" on TeleSUR English or LinkTV and get your hands those educational resources through our website. That’s GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Media Miss Half the Story of The Greek Election 3:00
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3:00Hi I’m Laura Flanders of GRITtv. When it comes to elections, there’s the “who” of politics and then there’s the “what” of it, by which I mean what do parties and politicians actually do to win support? While they’re not brilliant at covering the first, the money media in the US tend to be truly terrible at even considering the latter. The historic election in Greece is a case in point. Read the US press and you'd gather the following: Greece’s new Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, is its youngest ever (at forty); he's “far left,” “leftist,” a “leftist political maverick,” a “tough talker” and “charismatic.” Syriza, the party he leads, is usually called “radical," "far left," "extremist” or some mix of all the above. What's it to you? As public radio’s market report put it on the eve of the vote, “The potentially massive repercussions of this weekend’s election in a small corner of Europe is one more risk for the world to worry about.” So there you have it. Mad leftists win. Americans better watch out. If you read a little deeper, you might get a slightly fuller picture. After five years of recession and cuts, 1.3 million Greeks – some 26% of the workforce -- are without a job; wages are down by 38%, pensions by 45 %. Almost a third of Greeks are living below the poverty line and about that many have no health insurance. Running on a pledge to roll back spending cuts and renegotiate Greece’s loans, Tsipras's victory was generally described as a protest vote, or a vote against austerity, which it certainly was, but there’s a bit more to it, and it's interesting. On The LF Show we had a chance to talk with a member of Syriza’s Central Committee, Yiannis Bournous not long ago. It’s “not charismatic speeches from balconies” that win support, he said. It’s concrete help, and Syriza's offered a good deal of that to Greeks in need in the last few years. As we’ve reported in the past on the show, a solidarity movement has been growing in Greece in this crisis. It runs some 400 health clinics, a network of community kitchens, what they call Food Solidarity Centers and cooperative grocery stores. When the first Syriza members were elected to parliament in 2012 they voted to give 20% of their monthly salary to that movement, and as of this August, Bournous said Syriza volunteers were participating in 150 “networks of local solidarity" offering everything from free prescription drugs to free legal advice. Left or right, effective leadership is important, but it’s possible, just possible, that Greek voters were swayed less by one guy’s charisma than they were by hundreds of volunteers’ with a daily presence in their neighborhoods. If we looked at politics that way, how would US parties rate? You can watch The Laura Flanders Show on LINKtv and TeleSUR — or subscribe to the audio podcast on GRITtv.org. This week, author Michael Shuman on why it's so hard to invest your money locally, and a poor people's cooperative that's funded its start up without deep pockets or Wall Street cash. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Hi I’m Laura Flanders of GRITtv, for the Progressive Voices channel on Tune-In It tells you something about what’s laughingly called the public debate, when the most dovish voice on the questions of terrorism and war comes from a leader of the military industrial complex. Jens Stoltenberg is secretary general of NATO. He hasn’t appear in the US media in connection with the attacks in France, but he was there in Paris for the unity rally this month, and he was interviewed on the BBC soon after that. To the BBC World Service he could be heard saying radical things like individual people should be held responsible for criminal acts, not groups. Stoltenberg knows whereof he speaks. He was Prime Minister of Norway in 2011 when madman Anders Breivik killed 77 mostly teenagers in the deadliest attack in that country since World War II. Instead of acting “tough” and calling for new powers to wage war, Stoltenberg at that time, called on Norwegians to quote: "counter blind hate with argument and education” . His words from then got a new life on social media this January. On the BBC speaking about the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the kosher market, the NATO chief said crazy dove-ish things, like, “we have to distinguish between open debates and acts of violence." He even implied there was a role for courts. “Criminal acts have to be prosecuted with means of police and bringing those responsible to justice…” Clearly he didn’t get the memo about assassination drones. When UN human rights chief Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, declined to call 9-11 an act of war, and suggested we capture and prosecute instead of summarily execute those responsible, she lost her post and her voice in the US media almost at once. That's what I thought would happen to Stoltenberg. There's just no visible place for controversial views like these in the great free press we keep hearing about. However, luckily for Stoltenberg, there is one way back into the US media’s good graces . Soon after the Paris unity rally, the new NATO chief announced NATO’s latest high-ticket boondoggle - an “ultra-rapid-reaction force, “ called “spearhead” and in speech in Berlin he stressed the need for members of the US-led alliance to bump up investments in security forces austerity be damned. You need to invest more, amid challenges such as jihadist group Islamic State or the Ukraine crisis he said. You could almost hear the military contractors salivate. That did it. Within days, I could find half a dozen stories quoting the NATO Chief talking about that. You can watch The Laura Flanders Show on LINKtv and TeleSUR, or subscribe to the audio podcast at GRITtv.org. This week, former Congressional candidate Chuck Pennachio tells us about the openings for single pager at the state level, and a leader of Greek Left Party Syriza tells us what a difference local networks of solidarity might make. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
If Nigeria's Dead were Oil Profits The UN has called on Nigeria to restore law and order in the northeast and investigate mass killings alleged, to have been carried, out in the past few weeks by the militant group, Boko Haram. Boko Haram’s the same lot that last spring kidnapped 276 girls, most of whom have never been recovered. This January, while world attention was focused on the killings in Paris, Boko Haram waged an assault on two northern towns. Satellite imagery 'before and after' shows the town of Bega and its neighbor razed to the ground. The Nigerian government says 150, human rights groups say more than ten times that many were slaughtered. The exact numbers are hard to confirm. But one thing’s pretty certain: if what's been dismissed as a religious squabble in the north was taking place in oil pipeline territory in the south, neither the government in Ajuba, nor the world's most powerful nations, would be watching the violence escalate. Black lives don’t matter as much as white to the West, that’s clear. But everywhere #profitsmattermost. Western media stereotypes notwithstanding, Nigeria’s not some tin-pot state. The largest economy on the continent, a founding member of OPEC, one of the world's leading oil producers, it's not the government that's poor, only the vast majority of its people. Nigeria's seen billions of oil dollars flow through it, the lion’s share to corporations including Chevron, Exxon and Shell, but the oil giants have kicked back plenty to Nigerian leaders, elected and not, in exchange for protection. The military’s annual budget exceeds $6bn, and they've never been reluctant to use it to protect pipelines. The price of "security" has been paid in human life. In the mid 1990s when demonstrations by the people of Ogoniland threatened to shut down oil production, much of the Niger Delta was put under military occupation and "maintaining law and order" led to the killing of leading Ogoni activists including Ken Saro Wiwa. When a Chevron platform was occupied by youths, the company even provided its own helicopter to fly the armed forces in where they shot two unarmed protestors dead. Nigerians are going to the polls in mid February. President Goodluck Jonathan may be replaced. But it’s the wealth that needs shifting, not just the politicians in Nigeria. More oil money going to taxes, and things the Ogoni activists were demanding, like schools, clean water and healthcare, might have produced more democracy and less corruption, and perhaps less of that military budget would be ending up in generals' pockets. And who knows? If poverty was a bit less dire and popular discontent a bit less severe, Nigeria just might be less fertile territory for misogynist maniacs promising power and vengeance. Would the West care more if Nigerians were white? No doubt. But one thing's for sure, if you could make money from school girls, the most powerful people in the world would be all over this. Watch my interview with Patrick Cockburn about the perils of the West's reaction to the Paris killings at GRITtv.org and watch The Laura Flanders Show, 9 pm Fridays on LINKtv. Write to me: laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 From Drones to Chokeholds, We're Over-Policed! 3:02
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3:02Hi I’m Laura Flanders of GRITtv. I’ve just spent two very different weekends in the company of two very different groups of people dealing with two very related problems; on the one hand, invasive, warrantless wiretapping; on the other, violent, unwarranted policing. The first gathering was dominated by white people: hackers, journalists and artists, concerned about surveillance, secrecy and censorship. Their stories were hair-raising, dealing with tracked cellphones, data-driven drone strikes and whistleblowers imprisoned. Ten days later, with the Millions March in New York, the demographics were very different. Predominantly African American, the triggers there were police brutality and killings in communities of color – as well as official impunity in the slaughter of among others, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Aiyana-Stanley Jones, Tamir Rice... and the list keeps growing. The two groups and the two events differed, but they put me in mind of a single story: the one about feeling the elephant. In the story, a group of people who can’t see are trying to learn what an elephant looks like by touching it, but each is feeling a different part. Is the monstrous creature mostly tusk, all tummy or overwhelmingly trunk? Compiling the big picture is no simple matter, but when the touchers compare notes, it all comes together. Depending on who’s doing the touching, our creature feels like drones and wiretaps or guns and chokeholds, but can we agree we’re touching parts of the same elephant? It’s not affecting us all the same, or all of us equally, or with the same result, but it’s one big problem. From our government’s urge to control global communications and punish dissent to our beat cop’s demand for total submission and obedience; too many of us are being policed too much, too brutally, with too little accountability -- to grievous effect on our shared body politic. Coming together could make us smarter quicker. In just one example, in a recent interview with The Nation magazine, NSA leaker Edward Snowden asked: “The question is: particularly in the post-9/11 era, are societies becoming more liberal or more authoritarian?” Frontline communities of color could have answered that question right quick, and they might suggest that 9-11 doesn’t have much to do with it. Drones or chokeholds, our elephant is rampant policing or if you prefer, authoritarianism. Now if only all those who’ve been feeling it, tusk and trunk, could feel their way towards one another and make common cause to tame the monster. You can watch my interview with Robin D.G. Kelley author of Freedom Dreams on this topic and more at GRITtv.org and find out about The Laura Flanders Show which you can now see on LinkTV and TeleSUR English. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org. For GRITtv, I’m Laura Flanders.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Human Rights Day is coming up. It's marked every year on December 10th -- an occasion on which the world commemorates the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the US spreads lies about what’s in that document. On December 10, 1948, the UN General Assembly by a vote of 48 to zero adopted a sweeping agreement. After two world wars in which governments, including elected ones, waged war on their own citizens and on each other, the Declaration was conceived as a global code of conduct for governments, drawn up by people, not of any one nation, but all of them, to be enforced, together. In the US, when it’s marked at all, Human Rights Day is an occasion for rank hypocrisy. To take just one example, in 2009 President Barack Obama chest thumped his way through a statement about the US role in drafting the Declaration and then went on to shrink the rights in it to a teacup: the right of people to quote “live as they chose”, gather, speak, and have a say in their government. Even as he spoke about those "inviolable" rights, the US government, of course, was violating them. Worse than that, beyond the routine violation of the few things American Presidents are willing to accept just might be rights, the 44th continued a decades-long tradition of systematically robbing American citizens of lots of other rights the framers of the Declaration believed citizens had legitimate reason to expect: social and economic rights, like the right of every person to have access to healthcare, housing and education. Take a look. The right to be free of abuse like -- ahem – torture – is all very nice, but there are thirty articles in the Declaration and those have been elaborated on since, in agreements and treaties the US has mostly refused to ratify. Social and economic rights have deliberately been erased in the US consciousness because where Eleanor Roosevelt and the post-war signers saw human rights and government responsibilities -- US capitalists saw dollar signs and profit centers. It’s taken almost 70 years for some human rights to become respectable -- and meaningless. You can sue for the violation of your human live-free-from-torture right, but good luck if you’ve ever been called a terrorist, or scary (to a white person, as in, say, Arab or African American). US civilians can be ordered to bomb other nations for disrespecting human rights, but they’ll have a far harder time suing their own for affordable housing, education or healthy neighborhoods. In the US, those aren’t rights; they’re “issues", and we are free to talk, gather and start a million distinct organizations about them, and to petition our government and the rich people behind it to share what they’ve got with the rest of us. When it comes to rights, the US talks up a storm, but for some very specific reasons, we are very foggy on the concept. You can watch my interview with best selling author and activist Chris Hedges on this topic and more at GRITtv.org and find out more there about the syndication of The Laura Flanders Show. To tell me what you think, write to me: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
The Hillary Clinton nutcracker reappeared this week -- a blonde plastic doll with sharp, steel-lined legs. The stupid sexist toy came to retail shelves amid a slew of post midterm stories that repeated old boring guff about the Democrats' age, her health her ambition and her looks - and sent team Clinton into high dudgeon of course. In the months ahead, the Clinton camp may want to take note and stockpile those nut-cracking dolls if only to distract voters from more serious issues. When the stench of sexism is in the air, it's no surprise that feminist hackles rise and that’s typically worked for Clinton’s political fortunes. But before so much misogynist mud is thrown that progressive voters just can’t see straight, can we remember that there are plenty of models of valiant feminist leadership that, in contrast to the Senator, don’t involve waging war, protecting Wall Street and flacking for the world’s largest corporations? Take two women who were honored in Washington on the same day the nutcracker story (somehow) broke: former financial regulator Brooksley Born and Jobs with Justice director Sarita Gupta. Just over a decade ago, when she headed up the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, Born tried to regulate financial derivatives before they had a chance to blow the US economy up. Casssandra-like she saw the writing on Wall Street’s wall and was ignored belittled and driven out of her job by the very same Larry Summers and Robert Rubin who were close allies of Clinton. If Brooksley Born were running for the nomination, she’d no doubt be getting plenty of sexist grief —but without the six figure speaking fees that are reportedly coming from Goldman Sachs to Hillary. Sarita Gupta is a long-time crusader for women’s rights. To her, wages and trade rules are as much women’s issues as the right to a safe legal abortion. Gupta’s taken on among others, the global giant Wal-Mart over the exploitation of its drive-to-the-bottom supply chains. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, once served on the board of Wal-Mart; she’s rarely seen a trade deal she didn’t like. As secretary of state, she promoted the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the most far-reaching trade pact ever. So, sexist smoke, it smells and it has a way of getting in feminist eyes. But that shouldn’t blind us to the facts. While there’s every reason to think Hillary Clinton can handle a steely-thighed doll gag, the women of the world deserve better than another race in which smart feminists simply line-up, doll-like behind a Clinton candidate. You can watch my interview with Cindy Wiesner and Gopal Dayaneni on the how grassroots groups changed the agenda of the climate justice march, on the Laura Flanders Show at GRITtv.org. And find out more about our syndication on TeleSUR English and beyond. To tell me what you think, write to me: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Hart, Ferraro: Today's Dirty Tactics Have Old Roots 3:00
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3:00Former New York Times political correspondent Matt Bai is out with a new book about the decline of US campaigns and it’s a timely read in the cold post midterm winter. Bai’s topic is the downfall of Gary Hart, the Democratic Party’s 1988 front-runner until reporters working on a tip, staked out his home and turned up what looked a whole lot like an extramarital affair. Bai describes the Hart campaign’s unraveling thereafter as a disaster not just for the candidate, but for US elections thenceforth: “The first in a seemingly endless parade of exaggerated scandals and public floggings” that he argues have driven good talent out of politics. While the rest of the world was finished with the Hart story, Bai says he just couldn’t get it out of his head. Well here’s another, from four years earlier. If, as Bai writes, ’88 was the campaign in which, “politics went tabloid,” ’84 was arguably the year it became hazing, when the candidate was a woman. While it’s barely recalled in media accounts now, in 1984, the GOP mixed misogyny with mendacity and dirty tricks to defeat Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro. Mondale was centrist and dull and Ferraro certainly had her faults, but the first female vp’s opponents didn’t just stake out her house; they followed her every step, hurling abuse and misrepresented themselves as regular citizens. A Catholic, Ferraro was pro-choice. People posing as regular voters, stalked her route and did their best to drown out her campaign speeches with their heckling. “VP for Death” and “baby killer” were favorite epithets. The language got more brutal from there. The GOP said they had nothing to do with the thugs, of course. An audiotape proved different. On it, pickets could be heard being trained by party operatives to say, “I’m a concerned citizen” instead of “I’m with Students for Reagan.” Looking for the birth of today’s “dark money” tactics? You’d do well to look more closely at ’84. Bai blames technology and the proliferation of satellite news for the downward spiral of elections, but what the old media lacked in speed they more than made up for in well-organized mob tactics. The scene at Ferraro rallies came back into my head, when I saw a very similar bunch of bullies shut down the vote-count in 2000 in Florida. It’s worth noting today, as Democrats wrap up one humiliating election and rush horribly into another, where a woman may, just may be on the ballot. Watch out. If history teaches us anything it’s that the gutter tactics we tolerate being used on some today, have a habit of coming back to haunt everyone tomorrow. For more from me, watch “The Laura Flanders Show” at GRITtv.org where you can see our exclusive report on the blowback from anti-Sex Trafficking legislation in Alaska. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
It shouldn’t take a strike to keep first responders safe, but that seems to be what’s needed when those first responders are women. Hunks in hard hats, we make our heroes. Women in scrubs we’re not so sure about. Kaci Hickox, on her return from Sierra Leone, got quarantined in an outdoor tent at Newark Airport. Nurses at Bellevue where New York’s first Ebola patient got care, report being shunned in hospital elevators whether or not they treated Dr. Spencer. One lost a teaching gig. Another’s child was banned from day care. New York officials have finally promised to protect health workers from losing pay or promotions if they have to be quarantined. The new protections are modeled on the rights granted military reservists. If it takes a military metaphor, so be it: If we wouldn’t send a soldier to the front without a weapon, why is it so hard to require that our front line nurses be cared for? The nurses are our front line of defense — whether or not they go to West Africa and there's a reason Liberians are said to call Ebola the “nurse-killer.” I spent a couple of days with National Nurses United this week, the largest US nurses organization. They’re in contract negotiations with the California hospital chain, Kaiser, at the very same time that they’re fighting for safe effective Ebola standards. And the two fights are coming together - and to a head - this November. Why is it so hard to ensure protections for health care workers, and ipso facto, their patients? Because nurses - male or female - are low on the job-security totem pole. After Thomas Duncan first showed up with Ebola in Dallas, NNU received calls from nurses scared stiff that the’d be fired for disclosing that, contrary to the official talk of preparedness, Duncan’s nurses had been left to tape their own gowns to their masks leaving their skin exposed while they cared for him. Brina Aguirre, the Dallas RN who spoke up, should be remembered as the Karen Silkwood of our time, says NNU Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro. But atomic worker Silkwood ended up suspiciously contaminated and dead. It be nice if our nurses didn’t go the way of Silkwood. The NNU’s set November 12, for national actions, including a two day strike by 18,000 registered nurses at Kaiser. The latest CDC guidelines are an improvement, they say, but they’re still voluntary and full of loopholes. Without a national health system, our nation’s 5,000 hospitals are free to make 5,000 different decisions and being a for-profit system, dollars and cents have a way of trumping medical sense — nurses see it daily. Which is why NNU is calling on California, the 8th largest economy in the world, to set a national standard including a legal mandate and full-body hazmat suits — and they’re threatening strike action to get it. If nurses were cops, we’d be giving them tanks. If they were firefighters, there’d be nothing optional about their fireproof jackets. If they were rushing into burning buildings, instead of laying hands on sick people, we’d guarantee them protective gear? What is we don’t care about, about our nurses? You can watch my interview with best selling author Walter Mosley on the Laura Flanders Show at GRITtv.org and write to me: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
HI, I’m Laura Flanders of GRITtv. Infectious disease specialists say Ebola can't spread through the air, but the political grandstanding about it can and if history’s any guide, that could well do us more harm than the epidemic. To recap, while thousands of people in west Africa have contracted and died from Ebola, just a handful of Americans have so far come down with the disease. By contrast, more than 200,000 of us end up in the hospital every year from 'flu and still, many don’t bother with flu shots. While there’s no shot for Ebola, it can be killed by bleach and it can be contained, as the WHO says it has been in Nigeria, thanks to the calm, methodical action of smart, local health workers. I mention all that, because should you tune in to the US’s mid-term elections, you’ll hear Republicans and Democrats spreading all manner of panic. First they traded partisan attacks, accusing one another of not doing enough to keep Americans safe. Now, candidates of both parties are going after the President and government. Take those calls for a ban on travel from from Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone; something the administration and most public health experts oppose and think is crazy. Calls for a ban have long come from the lunatic fringe, and from not so fringe lunatics like House Speaker John Boehner. But Democrats too are buying into the ban. Candidates in tight races like Kay Hagan in North Carolina and Michelle Nunn in Georgia are both on board the travel ban bandwagon, and even the feminist’s favorite Texan, Wendy Davis has come out in favor. It’s a way to look tough and distant from the low approval ratings of the president. Besides, what’s public health expertise when polls report that sixty-seven percent of Americans are in favor — and even more in Texas? With just days to go before the vote, candidates seems to be competing for Ebola spotlight in an election season in which politics itself has lost the interest of the voting public. They’re tripping over each other to stoke fears and then pander to the fears they’ve stoked, and desperate for viewers to whom they can serve ads, cable news is all over it. President Obama is hardly immune. After all, it was he who kicked off the season calling for a "war on Ebola." Forty years ago, when he was in a tough spot, Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs”. That brought us our longest most deadly waste: a trillion dollars spent, more than 45 million drug arrests and nothing to show for it but abject failure. Where will the panic-mongering on Ebola lead? We don’t know yet, but we know where we’ve come from. The “war on drugs" brought us prisons packed with nonviolent offenders, mostly people of color. The "war" on illegal immigration brought us border camps packed with kids. The "war on terror" has led us straight to hell. Ebola is a crisis in West Africa. Here it’s not the pathogen that’s the problem, it’s our pathological political system. It spreads alarmism through the airwaves and the symptoms of contagion are madness. You can watch my interview with author, activist Arundhati Roy on the Myth of Gandhi and Glenn Greenwald on the corporate pillars of the National Security State at GRITtv.org. And you can also find our more about the syndication of the Laura Flanders Show on TeleSUR English. To tell me what you think, write to me: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 From Ferguson to the Nation: What if Moral Mondays Came Everyday? 2:59
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2:59The Moral Monday movement came to Missouri. What if it spread nationally, and to the rest of the week? Police arrested more than fifty people in front of the Ferguson Police Department Monday October 13, during demonstrations against the police killing of black men in the area, including teenager Michael Brown last August. The one person police have yet to arrest, is officer Darren Wilson, Brown’s shooter. And that was one of the complaints of the protestors. Organizers planned the action as part of a weekend of resistance, inspired by the weekly Moral Monday protests in North Carolina which which started a year ago, in protest of right wing attacks. Among those arrested in Ferguson Monday was Cornell William Brooks president of the NAACP and Dr. Cornel West, along with religious leaders of every faith and gender and race. Critics called everyone "outside agitators" of course. But police impunity is hardly a local problem. The actions came as a study by Pro Publica revealed that black teens were about 21 times as likely as their white peers to be shot and killed by police, and as the online activist group Color of Change kicked off a campaign to tweet the name of one black police killing victim every hour, for the duration of the Ferguson protests. There are plenty of names because according to Pro Publica, in the seven years leading up to 2012, white officers killed a black person at least twice a week. What next? The power of the Moral Monday movement has come from its persistence and the breadth of the alliances behind it. Anti-austerity activists teamed up with reproductive rights campaigners, union and religious leaders. They have distinct issues and experiences, but they’ve made common cause. Missouri’s seen some of that sort of multi-denominational action. Many workers in the St. Louis area Fast Food campaign, for example, were in the streets protesting the killing of Brown at the start. Still, it’s also true that in our increasingly re-segregated nation, too much ignorance continues. Whether its willful or not, is almost beside the point. On the eve of the protests white residents in St. Louis told the Washington Post they’d been surprised, even "shocked" by the racial divisions exposed since the killing of Brown Listen. Friends don’t let friends drink and drive. It’s too dangerous. What if we, especially we White people didn’t let our friends live in oblivious privilege. It’s just as dangerous for the public health. What if, every time some TV agitator accused the NAACP of sending in outsiders, we answered that there is no getting outside police killings.... What if, Bill McKibben who led hundreds of thousands to protest climate justice in New York, stood up and said: “That’s me you’re talking about.” We can make common cause. It may take Moral Mondays, and Tuesdays and Wednesdays. But perhaps at the end of it, we’ll have police as ready to arrest their own shooters as they are speedy to arrest Cornel West. I'm Laura Flanders . You can watch my interview with indigenous activist Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, on the "true history" of the United States on the Laura Flanders Show at GRITtv.org. You can also find our more about our syndication on TeleSUR English and beyond. To tell me what you think, write to me: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
The US is under pressure to respond to allegations of war crimes in connection with its air strikes on Syria. But how do you assess disproportionate harm when this entire assault is disproportionate and premised on undefined threats? Local residents in the village of Kafr Deryan recently video taped bits of a Tomahawk missile at the site of a strike that they say killed at least two men two women and five kids September 23. Only the US and UK have Tomahawks so Human Rights Watch is asking the US to investigate. The group is further demanding that international law be obeyed and strikes be avoided that might have a disproportionate impact on civilians versus the expected military advantage. Now I've always been skeptical of international laws of war. They tend to coddle the conscience and imply war can be made kind. But the problem here is even more specific. Even when Barack Obama launched his bombing campaign he made no claim of self defense. At that time, remember, American intelligence had concluded that ISIS posed "no immediate threat" to the U.S. so-called "homeland." In his speech, launching the attack, the president said exactly that. The no-threat story was front page news. Many officials and terrorism experts quoted at the time believed that the actual danger of ISIS had been distorted by hours of alarmist TV. An anti-terror analyst with the Rand Corporation was quoted by the New York Times, saying “It’s pretty clear that upping our involvement in Iraq and Syria makes it more likely that we will be targeted by the people we are attacking.” And still the campaign was launched. All that history's worth remember because now officials and the press are full of talk of a brand new supposed threat, dire enough to merit the US assault. The Khorasan Group: supposedly a pack of Al Quaeda veterans whom the Administration say do intend to target the US. Frankly, when it comes to threats to the so-called "homeland" the White House seems way more vulnerable to the disturbed veterans of the US's own wars. No Al Qaeda vet has so far managed to open the front door and run through the place with a knife. Still the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper made it sound scary when he said “In terms of threat to the homeland, Khorasan may pose as much of a danger as the Islamic State.” Scary, Until you remember, that that’s not saying much. The point is, proof of claim doesn't seem to be required for the US to bomb and kill; nor even any evidence of military advantage. In that Syrian village, it's the reverse. There, the Department of Defense says it has no credible proof of civilian deaths, despite video and eye witness reports. They do, on the other hand, claim that several strikes have “disrupted an imminent attack against the US and Western interests.” To all those who imagined the presidency of phantom threats was over with the departure of George W. Bush, that's over. The one threat that is very real is that the US public will be terrified by all this and the killing and dying will escalate. ..... The "F" Word is a weekly commentary from Laura Flanders. Watch The Laura Flanders Show in full, on TeleSUR English or at GRITtv.org. This week, Gar Alperovitz on "America After Capitalism" . Find out more at GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Demanding Local Power from Hong Kong to New York 2:58
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2:58Imagine: a wave of protests engulfs a city, demanding attention to a lack of democracy. Police fire tear gas, local lawyers object, and instead of dispersing, the protests don't dwindle, they grow. A week in, thousands of students are boycotting their classes and major junctions in the city are occupied and shut down. Peaceful protestors in black receive respectful attention from the public and the press and the story is front page news around the world. That story's from Hong Kong, but what if it wasn't? What if that was the story of the same week in New York? What if, after 400,000 marched through Manhattan those protestors hadn't hopped on buses; what if those protestors had refused to go home? In Hong Kong, the people in the streets have a few clear demands. They want open elections with candidates they can pick. What if we had rallied for the same? The Hong Kong protestors want candidates -- not cronies - not people picked in private by an unaccountable committees. They want universal suffrage and a real say in local decision-making. What if the Climate justice marchers had demanded the same stuff? In our case, how about publicly funded elections? Not candidate picking by private funders and political campaign committees? How about an end to pay-to-play decision making and the recurring threats to some people's right to vote. Direct democracy. If it's a good demand for Hong Kong, it's a good demand in the US too. The Hong Kong democrats want island policy set by island people, or at least people who put local interests first. Not rule by far off bureaucrats or the permanent power of permanent power. If the majority in US opinion polls say they want more spending on shared goods like schools and transit and renewable energy, why is corporate pressure so often able to stop worthy projects in their tracks and push through dirty oil and gas pipelines instead? Decentralized power, electoral transparency, local decision making about local concerns: are those Hong Kong's demands or ours? You tell me. One sure way to distinguish their protests from ours, is that seven days on, there's were still in the street, while ours had gone home and business was back to usual. You can watch my interview with Naomi Klein on the climate crisis that "Changes Everything", and, coming up, my interview with Gar Alperovitz on "America After Capitalism" on the Laura Flanders Show on GRITtv.org. You can also find our more about our syndication on TeleSUR English. To tell me what you think, write to me: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
On Sunday September 21st, huge crowds marched through Manhattan. More than 1,000 environmental justice, labor, faith and grassroots groups mobilized and trod the many steps down the city’s upper west side and through midtown to end up somewhere west of Penn Station. The People’s Climate March was peppered with signs: "Save the planet," "Reinvest in our cities," "Sea walls not war…. " For every person there seemed to be a particular passion. While there was no single policy ask, a few of the organizers (people whom I respect), laid out their reasons for marching in an essay published a few weeks ahead of time. “We march because the we’ve raised the planet’s temperature almost one degree” they wrote. We march because we now that “while climate change affects everyone its impacts are not equally felt.” We march in frustration - why haven’t our societies responded to a quarter century of warnings? "We March in hope too." I was reading along, happily enough until I got to that point. Hope? If ever there was a time to banish that word, surely this is that moment. Don't get me wrong, I know people need reasons to get up - and get out in the streets in the morning. But hope? Look it up. It’s vapid at best, insidious at worst and it's had a hold on us for way too long. According to the dictionary definition: Hope is "a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen." Alternatively, "a person or thing that may help or save someone; grounds for believing that something good may happen." Isn't the climate marchers' point that the climate crisis is right here right now? It’s not about feelings, fears or expectations; it’s current tense. Point two, I thought, has to do with power. We've tried desiring, or believing that someone outside of us will save us. Haven't we? I could have sworn that was the idea behind the People's March. What are we hoping for? In whom? In what? When? I humbly suggest that we've been in a trance, brought on by decades of political pacification: Barack Obama ran on hope. Bill Clinton came from there. I suspect even Jesse Jacksons's willing to admit that his phrase "keep hope alive" is long past it's sell-by date. Especially in the climate context in which the science can seem mysterious and the solutions just impossible it seems to me it's time to break the trance of hope: Lots of people are doing it. Grassroots climate justice groups from Manhattan to Black Mesa are saying we can do this: we can decentralize control, take up tools and implement plans to produce locally, distribute equitably, and shore up the commons. We can do this. But not of we wait and project and hope. We can do this if we get really comfortable first with being right here right now in this state with these opponents. And then very serious -- not about hope. But about each other. Break the trance!…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 It's Not the Carbon; It's the Capitalism! 3:00
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3:00The big climate march in New York City and a big new book have concentrated attention on the climate. Enough denial and delay the marchers chant; This Changes Everything, says Naomi Klein in her latest call to action. "It's not about carbon, it's about capitalism," says Klein. I couldn’t agree more. It’s time we faced not just the symptoms, but the system that is cozying us up to catastrophe. Our economic system of extract, exploit and profit is colliding with our eco-system, writes Klein and in case anyone is unclear about the consequences of that: when the ideology of infinite growth meets the reality of finite fuel and earth, reality is the odds-on favorite. We can’t keep drilling and billing the future forever. It’s a relief to see people in the streets and a relief to see Crisis and Capitalism in the same sentence. We heard plenty about the crisis of capitalism during the last recession. What Klein keeps us thinking about is the crisis that is capitalism. After all, only people in crisis will work long hours for low pay and someone else’s profit. It’s good to see people talking about crisis and capitalism. We need to talk about power too. Not just fuel, but influence. The fossil fuel cartel, reports Klein, spent $400,000 a day last year lobbying Congress and that’s not criminal or corruption, that’s just democracy under capitalism. With big profits, comes powerful propaganda. (You only have to look at the underwriting on public television to see that.) And the UN’s Climate Summit has seen plenty of greenwashing. While regular people have been in the streets, big business leaders have been in the suites — making all sorts of promises to self-regulate their emissions and come up with market-driven solutions like carbon trading. But in the hands of unnatural beings like corporations is no place to leave our natural resources. We saw what happened when Wall Street made bet on our homes. What do we think they'll do with our bio-derivatives? Do we really want commodities traders, who've made a casino out of our food supply, to turn next to our air and water? As Klein points out, just eight huge agri-businesses firms hold almost all the patents on the latest climate-ready crops. They'll never techno-fix our farms and forests without expecting us to pay for it. Commodities, crisis, climate, capitalism. Lots of good words are in the mix. The word we need to take out and give up on is confidence, confidence that anything but a systems change will fix this. Because what needs fixing isn’t just the carbon, remember; it’s capitalism and the concentration of wealth and power. If we fail to act, the same people who profit off war, will certainly find a way to make a mint off warming.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 De Blasio in New York: If You Can Do It Here... 2:55
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2:55Bill de Blasio is now Mayor-elect de Blasio. Take that, all of you who doubted that a candidate who planted his campaign on a promise of tackling inequality could attract enough support to win. On November 5, New Yorker’s elected just such a guy by a landslide: 73 to 24 percent. On Election night, de Blasio took the stage, not in some swanky corporate ballroom in a midtown Manhattan hotel but in the Park Slope Armory – a big brick Brooklyn building now functioning as a YMCA. Now the work really starts. In a city that’s seen the richest 1 percent’s share of the wealth soar – from 12 percent in 1980 to 39 percent last year – de Blasio ran on a pledge to tax the rich to fund universal pre-k and after school care. It’s just a tiny hike on incomes half a million and up, but it’ll still need the state legislature’s support. Where billionaire mayor Bloomberg has shared the public largesse with the affluent – showering tax breaks on luxury property owners and increasing tax subsidies for developers by a factor of ten – de Blasio wants a “Unified Development Budget” that would spread subsidies throughout the city”and he’s proposed “economic development hubs” not just in the fashionable design and high-tech sectors, but in every neighborhood. He’s also proposed a new revolving loan fund that would free up credit for small and neighborhood businesses – as he says – “to fulfill the role most banks have abandoned.” But how about going a step further, as the Mayor of Richmond, CA has done, to seize inflated mortgage debts from avaricious banksters, and force a reduction of what mortgage holders owe so people can stay in their homes and fewer homes get boarded up? Or taxing, not just the richest New York city residents, but also the absentee oligarchs – like the ones who recently bought two $90 million dollar penthouses on 57th Street or the $55 million condo chaps who don’t pay any city tax because they actually live somewhere else. The Tea Party wing of tabloid press is freaking. The New York Post has pretty much declared that socialists are marching on City Hall. De Blasio’s hardly nationalizing Wall St (or driving Disney out of Times Square) but his victory is a triumph for the labor and community coalition that backed him: yhe Working Families Party, which Fox News (and the Post) love to hate. Working Families is being called the “left-wing mouse that roared in city politics” this week. It all bodes for an interesting year. A non-billionaire mayor, backed by labor with a budget of $72 billion to dispense? It’ll be worth watching. You know what they say: If you can do it here… For more from me, including an interview with one of just four doctors who still perform late abortions in America, check out GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
We need Robin Hood because between them the richest 400 Americans are worth just over $2 trillion dollars. We only need a fraction of that to stop food stamp cuts. Robin Hood would know what to do. Read more at http://GRITtv.org.
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Finally Someone's Paying Attention to Our Imbalance! 2:52
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2:52It was early but for a moment I thought I was reading something important in an ad in the New York Times. Someone was paying attention to our nation's teetering imbalance! (Not. )
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
In the same week that the pseudo-Nobels in economics were announced, regular Americans were diving into economics. October 12-18 is New Economy Week. Read more about New Economy Week in Yes Magazine.
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Big Labor is welcoming domestic workers like family. But are they getting up and washing the dishes?
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Noam Chomsky on GRITtv with Laura Flanders 19:23
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19:23What do Takism Square, Google Glass, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and NSA data gathering have in common? Find out in this interview with Noam Chomsky. This conversation was recorded backstage at the Left Forum in New York, June 8, 2013.
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Laura Flanders: The "F" Word - Democracy is Not A Disease 2:59
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2:59It is a mind-boggling thing to hear an international journalist compare democracy to disease, but that’s just what happened in a CNN debate around military action in Syria.
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 The Price For Praising the March on Washington is A Peace Conference. 3:04
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3:04Fifty years after the historic March on Washington, President Obama is participating in celebrations at the Lincoln Memorial. At the same time, he’s said to be considering authorizing action in Syria. I’m sorry Mr. President, but you cannot simultaneously celebrate a nonviolent movement and contemplate military strikes.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 This LGBT Pride, Let's Celebrate Difference not Sameness 3:01
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3:01It’s hard to imagine an American poet more celebrated than four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost whose most famous poem concludes: “Two roads diverged in a wood and I —I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” When the most celebrated poet’s most well-known lines praise difference why is it that we’re scared of it? Maybe we need more poets. That’s what John F Kennedy said just weeks before his death, at the groundbreaking of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College. It was soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War was raging on, ten million Americans needed jobs, America needed strength, said Kennedy, but strength he said, “takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant.” The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation's greatness, the President continued, “but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable… for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.” Music and poetry and the arts push us, said Kennedy. (QUOTE) “When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence.” That was half a century ago. Today we have months dedicated supposedly to “diversity” including this one, June, LGBTQI Pride Month. Except mostly, we don’t celebrate diversity, we celebrate sameness. We honor all the progress that we lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans Americans have made, becoming “accepted” as, well, just like everybody else. Now, I’m all for everyone enjoying the same rights in these United States. I support that – on-going - project. But I’d like to celebrate something else too: roads less travelled. Especially the roads less travelled that LGBTQI people take daily, opening up the possibilities for everybody. The same old roads will take us to the same old destinations. It’s divergence, as the straight, white poet once wrote, that makes all the difference. You can watch my interview with poet and disability justice activists Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at GRITtv.org. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Sticks and stones may not break your bones, but stereotypes can certainly put your life in danger. That’s the message of a new report on police violence against women of color. Not only are black women, just like black men, in interactions with the police often alleged to be armed and dangerous when they’re not, but even when they are experiencing a mental health crisis, black women are seen as somehow invulnerable. I heard the same thing repeatedly last week when I sat with relatives of black women victims of police violence in the run up to the extraordinary #sayhername protests that took place in several major cities in the US. In more than half of their stories, the victims were in need of help not violence, and yet in just about every case the killer justified his acts on the basis that he feared for his life. Michelle Cusseaux’s mother Frances, said she called her daughter’s mental health facility to check on Michelle because she lived alone and seemed to be having a break down. Instead of help, came cops, and one sergeant who decided to shoot the five-foot five, one hundred and thirty-pound Michelle in the heart because, he said, he felt threatened, by “the look on her face.” Kayla Moore was acting oddly and talking to herself when her roommates called for mental health assistance. Instead of psychiatric professionals came police who decided to isolate, restrain and attempt to arrest Kayla, a transgender woman, by sitting on her. She ultimately suffocated to death. She was “seemingly violent” the police said later. There’s "seemingly violent" and then there’s all this death. The stories of Cusseaux and Moore and others, are written up in a new report from the African American Policy Forum. “The fact that black women are rarely viewed as women in distress can cost them their lives," the authors write. Even when they’re in trouble, black women are perceived as threatening. Already vulnerable, they end up victims. Several of the families are calling for new laws, requiring that trained health professionals respond to health crisis calls and that police officers receive some mental health training. It’s about time. It's also way past time to stop the deadly stereotype. You can watch my interview with Author, Professor, Ruth Wilson Gilmore on the Economy of Incarceration all this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at GRITtv.org. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 From Belfast To Baltimore Bad Police Tactics Spread. Can Justice Too? 2:59
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2:59It’s an old adage but it’s true, especially when it comes to policing: an injury to one really is an injury to all. That’s because like a bad movie, bad police tactics spread the globe. Accountability can go global too, but as in a recent case out of Ireland, justice moves more slowly. Shortly after the death of Baltimore’s Freddie Gray, a leaked police document claimed that a prisoner transported with Gray heard him “banging against the walls” of the vehicle as if he “was intentionally trying to injure himself.” That prisoner quickly refuted the story, but not before it brought to my mind very similar claims from police in Northern Ireland. "Throwing oneself down stairs…punching own face and poking own eyes...injury to the neck by attempted self-strangulation.” That’s how investigators explained injuries sustained in police custody in Ireland according to documents recently dug up by human rights investigators. They’ve spent years getting beneath the spin, and now we know that while they fed the public guff about “self inflicted” harm, internally British ministers sanctioned torture . The new evidence is returning attention to a case that has serious implications for the UK and the US also. It involves twelve men, aged between 19 and 42, who were rounded up during the period of mass internment in the early ‘70s and subject to hooding, prolonged stress positions, white noise, sleep deprivation and deprivation of food and drink –the so-called “five techniques” developed by the British Army during what they called “The Troubles.” When the European Court of Human Rights ruled on the case in ’78, they declared the treatment “inhuman and degrading” but not torture. The Bush administration reportedly cited that decision in justifying its own torture programs. Soon enough, Britain’s “five techniques” started showing in Abu Graib and Gitmo. Now the Irish Government is backing a call for the Court to reopen the case. And all because the families simply wouldn’t give up. They’ll be represented this time by among others, attorney Amal Clooney, but her celebrity shouldn’t obscure decades of work done by the families and grassroots groups like the Center for the Administration of Justice and the Pat Finucance Center. Their victory would be huge on that side of the Atlantic and this one. It all goes to show that the police tactics a far-off stranger is facing today just may be what you’re up against tomorrow. Can I hear it for a global movement? You can watch my interview with Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors on building a global justice movement this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at GRITtv.org. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
US media coverage of the Middle East is awash in vagueness – I’m looking at two headlines this year, “Palestinian Said to Be Killed by Israeli Soldiers” and “Palestinian Driver Suspected of Deliberately Hitting Jerusalem Bus Stop.” On top of the vagueness, there’s the imbalance. As the US Campaign to End the Occupation reported this April, a single rocket from Gaza into Israel this year, outweighed six Israeli incursions and 67 attacks on the strip in the same three months. You could be forgiven for thinking it’s by design that certain facts get lost in the morass. But how about $5.4 billion dollars? That’s how much countries around the world pledged last year for what State Department officials described as “life-saving humanitarian assistance to help meet emergency needs in Gaza” after Israel’s 50 day onslaught last summer. Between early July and August 26th last year, the conflict killed more than 2,100 Palestinians mostly civilians, and 73 Israelis, mostly soldiers, and left some18,000 homes and vital infrastructure in ruins. Which is what The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) says they are still: ruins. “Not a single home has been rebuilt” UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness reported on April 23. To date, he said, the UN agency has received funding to reconstruct just 200 of the 9,161 houses that need to be rebuilt. Israel’s ongoing economic siege, which keeps most building supplies out, doesn’t help. Still those billions could make the difference. IN addressing donor nations last October, Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, called Gaza a tinderbox.” “People need to see results in their daily lives” he stressed. They haven’t. Budget crunchers love to crunch the numbers on government spending. How about crunching a bit on non-spending in Gaza before another hot summer starts? You can watch my interview with Israeli peace activist Ronnie Barkan this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at GRITtv.org. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Indictments are nice, but institutional change is necessary. That’s the message bellowing out of Baltimore. Even as she announced charges against six officers in the death of Freddie Gray, State Attorney Marilyn Mosby called for “structural and system changes.” Why focus on the structural when there’s a homicide to prosecute? Here’s a case in point. It doesn’t get more structural than bricks and mortar and that’s at least part of where Gray’s troubles started: with lead poisoning. Gray and his sisters grew up in a house with lead paint peeling off the walls. At 22 months old Gray’s blood contained almost eight times the level the CDC says can be dangerous. All the kids had trouble in school. Gray never graduated, and sadly that's no surprise. Studies have shown that children poisoned with lead are six times more likely to drop out of school and seven times more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system. Is Gray dead because of lead? No, but it’s not unconnected to the systems of power and racial ranking that killed him. Scientists have known for years that lead is poisonous. At high concentrations, it can kill, but even trace levels affect the development of children. And yet the US almost half a century behind other countries in banning lead in paint – why? Ask the powerful Lead Industries Association which thwarted public health efforts. Public health paid for private profits and African Americans paid most highly. At the time of the ban, a national survey found that black children were six times more likely to have elevated lead than whites. As if that wasn’t enough, in the 1990s as Gray was growing up, a Johns Hopkins study in Baltimore enrolled slumlords to move poor families into homes where kids were exposed to levels of lead known to cause permanent damage – for the sake of science. Those families weren’t wealthy whites. Nor was this the first time black lives were sacrificed for (white) “public” health research. Written up in the book Lead Wars, the Johns Hopkins lead study was compared to the Tuskegee experiment in which hundreds of black men with syphilis were denied life saving penicillin for decades, also for research purposes. There’s a reason the Black Panthers community health clinics conducted lead screenings. Gray’s poisoning wasn’t personal. It was political. And structural. And needs changing. You can watch my interview with Kimberle Williams Crenshaw on Why Black Girls Matter on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at GRITtv.org. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 The Missing Millions in Prison, Aren't Missing. We Are. 2:59
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2:59It’s becoming popular in the media to talk about the missing millions-- the 1.5 million African American men in their prime who are missing from civic life. Those millions, it’s explained, are mostly missing because they’ve died young or been locked up. There’s been a catastrophic rise of incarceration in the US over the past four decades. But missing from the missing men stories are the women whose rates of incarceration have risen fastest of all. In 2013, approximately 111,300 women were in US prisons, a 900 percent increase over 1977. They’re absent from our streets and also from this coverage. As every study shows, the majority of incarcerated women are non-violent offenders with little education or employment experience, and lots of history of abuse. Girls of color are more likely to be locked up than white girls. Gender non-conforming girls are most likely of all, and two thirds of incarcerated women have kids. They’re not missing. They’re missed. Incarceration tears families and communities apart. To let some women know they hadn’t been forgotten, three young activists recently organized a performance in a women’s prison, Taconic, about an hour outside of New York City. As prison policies tend to be made with men, not women in mind, they brought a play by, with, and about women: Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues, and to perform, they brought professional actresses, activists, and three women who’d served over half a century between them, in the maximum-security prison across the street. Coming back, and watching their audience stream in to the prison lunchroom, the cast fell quiet, as women saw women they’d left behind inside, and guards saw women they’d not seen since they’d got out. Visitors and prisoners are not allowed to hug, or get close or touch. Separation is sternly enforced. Still, after ninety minutes of laughing, crying, whooping and tearing-up together thanks to the tragi-comic Monologues, all the women were feeling a lot. Before they left, they semi-circled into a group air hug – old arms, young arms, arms in silk, arms in made-for-men green cotton prison tops – reaching out, towards one other. The missing aren’t missing. We keep them at a distance. What if we broke it? Those inside aren’t missing; they’re waiting, on us, for justice. They’re not missing. We are. Join me, May 8th, for Risky Talking: a conversation about risk, confinement and escape, with Piper Kerman, whose memoir Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison was adapted into the hit series on Netflix, and Donna Hylton, who served 25 years in the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility and currently works as a Community Health Advocate for formerly incarcerated people. Moderate by me with MacArthur Award-winning choreographer Elizabeth Streb. Complete with wild action moments from the STREB company. Find out more at GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Don't Expect The Master's Media To Cover the Master's Trade Deal 3:00
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3:00LED signs, banner drops, projections on famous monuments; activists have used all manner of tactics to spread the word about the Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP. Still, a vote on the largest trade pact of our time is looming before most voters have even heard of it. Media coverage might have helped, but in the eighteen months leading up to January 1 this year, network news: ABC, CBS, and NBC made no mention of the TPP - none - and cable news was hardly better, you can thank Media Matters for the data. Now that lawmakers are debating putting the TPP on a fast track the Partnership is a story, but it’s not your story, it’s a Beltway story, about how the deal’s fate will affect politicians. Will the president get what he wants? Will her support for the pact hurt Hillary? What about all those Republican haters who’ve found something Barack-ish to love? Superficial coverage should come as no surprise. Expecting monopoly-made media to cover a made-for-monopolies trade deal is madness. What's in it for them? The very same money media corporations that purport to bring us the news, won’t wade into the weeds about jobs and wages and profits, why? Well maybe it’s because they have flesh in the trade deal game. Multinational mass media corporations like Walt Disney, NewsCorps and Comcast distribute content and own outlets around the world. Pesky citizens in some countries have already passed environmental regulations, consumer protection laws and labor rights. What if people started passing laws defending media pluralism too? What if cities or states started passing legislation that favored home-grown media over Disney? A draft of the TPP leaked by Wiki-leaks earlier this year contains provisions that permit global corporations to sue over local preference laws – and charge for compensation for lost profits too. On our show, we talk every week with people who’ve soured on neo-liberalism. They’re looking to deepen democracy and decentralize wealth. Some are inspired by participatory budgeting in Brazil, others by the Zapatista experiment in Mexico. Many fancy putting local tax dollars to work for local worker-recovered companies like the ones in Argentina, or cooperatives, like those in Mondragon? From what we know now, the TPP will make all that harder. But, to paraphrase the poet Audre Lorde, don’t look to the master’s media to cover the master’s monopolies. It won’t happen. Want a new economic system? You need systemically different media too. You can watch my interview with Nathan Schneider on the global cooperative movement and an update on the New Era Windows cooperative in Chicago this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all our archives at GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Visionary Sci Fi for an Age of Acquiescence 3:00
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3:00Hi I’m Laura Flanders of GRITtv. A new book just out on the Gilded Age, calls ours an Age of Acquiescence. We’ve become a nation of accepters, its author argues, wiling to tolerate corporate crime and public poverty as inevitable outcomes of a system that’s just rigged. The current public debate, author Steven Frazer suggests, reflects a resignation that market capitalism is bedrock, unchangeable. Simply the way things are. A century after the Gilded Age and the rise of corporate power, we’ve become wussies, by comparison. Back then, wealth was just as condensed. The richest 1 percent owned over half of it while the bottom 44 shared just 1.1 percent of it all. But theirs was an age of sit down strikes and rebellion. Troops not just cops, routinely hit the streets. What happened? As followers of our program know, at the Laura Flanders Show we don’t believe there’s so much resignation. There’s more rising going on than our money media show. Still, there’s truth in Frazer’s case that 19th unrest was fuelled in part by a different frame of reference. To 19th century factory workers, the age of alienation was new. Descendants of subsistence farmers and self employed craftsmen, they remembered as we do not, an alternative and they chafed at logging-in and logging out. “Wage slavery” they called it. When I asked a class of college students what they understood that term to mean, a room of blank faces stared back at me not long ago. “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable” science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin said upon receiving a National Book Award for literature last fall. But then, she continued, “so did the divine right of kings.” In hard times, she said, we need fiction - “writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.” Which is why there’s so much to celebrate in the publication of a new book: Octavia’s Brood, an anthology of visionary science fiction written by social justice organizers and activists. Can we rely on memory to imagine alternatives? Not in the way the 19th century rabble could. But we have radical sci-fiction as the editors put it, to help us “decolonize” our brains. You can watch my interview with Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Maree Brown the editors of Octavia’s Brood as well as our report on the Incite Conference in Chicago, this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR, and find all my interviews and reports at GRITtv.org. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
“The cost of doing business.” That’s what corporations call it when they claim a deduction from their taxes for the damage they’ve done to people and the planet. It’s a cost of doing business all right; a cost to us, of doing business with them the way we currently do it, and it’s just one of the reasons so many people are calling for a whole new system. To recap: on April 20, 2010, BP’s leased Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, killing eleven workers and spilling oil into the Gulf of Mexico. That rig kept spewing for 87 miserable days while reporters were kept away and the company told the public lies. Five years on, BP’s has been found guilty of gross negligence and misconduct. They’ve been slapped with $42 billion in fines and damages. But the British behemoth’s not only threatening to pull out of the Gulf entirely if its fines aren’t reduced,they’re claiming a lot of that money back, thanks to a tax loophole that will enable BP to claim as much as 80 percent of the damages they've paid out as an ordinary business expense. It’s not just BP either. Car makers, chemical companies, mine owners and banksters routinely deduct part of their court ordered payouts from their taxes...That means we the people who sustained the damage, are also subsidizing the damages. US PIRG - the Public Interest Group are petitioning the Justice Department to deny BP more write-offs. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont has sponsored a bill to change close the loophole. But even to talk about a loophole suggests there’s an opening in a fabric that's otherwise intact. When it comes to the public's contract with big business, that fabric never been stitched straight. Big business has too much power and local coffers are far too strapped. That’s dangerous for people and the planet as we saw in the gulf – and small reforms are not enough to fix it. That’s why more and more people are looking at alternatives: not just renewable energy, but collectively owned utilities, and local not corporate control. “There’s a revolution going on right now when it comes to local power,” Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self Reliance told us. Mitchell and a slew of Laura Flanders Show guests just signed onto “A Next System Project” launched by our colleagues at the New Democracy Collaborative. There’s no doubt more to come. But it just may be this is a great time for BP to move out. The bill for the cost of doing business big business's way just may be coming due. You can watch my interview with Stacy Mitchell and Esteban Kelly of the Aorta Collective on the growing movement for a new economy this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at GRITtv.org. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 High Stakes Testing for High Stakes Economy 3:00
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3:00Hi I’m Laura Flanders of GRITtv. Governor Scott Walker stirred up the hornets this winter when he not only proposed cutting $300 million from the University of Wisconsin's budget, but simultaneously tried to change the vaunted mission of that institution from seeking truth and serving society to “meeting the needs of the workforce.” Walker’s effort to edit UW’s Progressive Era principles angered educators and students and led party predictable pundits to cry out about the presumed presidential contender’s Tea Party plans for education. What’s been missed in all this is that while Walker may be their pal, putting schools to work for business is hardly a Tea Party innovation. Businesses have always looked to classrooms to serve up pliant workers. One hundred years ago, Wisconsin’s Idea was notable precisely because in the age of the industrialization, the pressure was on for schools to produce workers fit for factories. Craftsmen had a nasty habit of walking off the production line at the degradation of their labor by automation. The 1917 Smith Hughes Act funded two tracks of manual education: the vocational and the general to more smoothly ease blue and white-collar workers into their places. Vocational ed. endured until such time as US manufacturers fancied shedding their US workers, when, in the 1980s and 90s, government started pushing college degrees for all, no matter how unpredictable and how costly. Today’s high stakes economy favors high stakes testing. All those tests are a nifty profit center themselves (which is why so many profit driven folks are lobbying mightily for them) but polarizing testing also serves the needs of a polarized economy. Multiple (which is to say actually, minimal)choice testing doesn’t produce the kind of creative thinking we need to solve today’s pressing problems (which may be why the rich don’t force their kids to do it), but tests reinforce the myth of meritocracy and with it the idea that those at the top are deserving. When we interviewed people for Own the Change, about starting worker owned-cooperative businesses, the single biggest challenge they named was a lack of training in cooperation. Walker blamed his editing plan on an underling’s error and backed away from it, but education-for-the-workforce isn’t going away. It’s enshrined in today’s Common Core curriculum as school reformer Jesse Hagopian reports in his inspiring book on the uprising taking place in education. The question for those who seek structural change now, is if a polarizing education meets the needs of a polarizing workforce, what sort of education befits an economy that puts people first, and the needs of profit behind community and the planet? You can watch my interview with Jesse Hagopian, editor of More Than A Score, The Uprising Against High Stakes Testing this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at GRITtv.org. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Women’s History Month is drawing to a close and as if on cue, we saw another example of why paying attention to gender matters, and how for the most part we still don’t do it. In their blistering review of the Ferguson Police Department, Justice Department investigators reported that racism was pervasive, along with a longstanding practice of ignoring allegations of racial discrimination and abuse. The statistic that got the most gasps was that in a city where two thirds of residents are African American, just four out of Ferguson’s 54 commissioned officers are black. Lack of diversity dominated the coverage and rightly so, but investigators also found evidence of another problem: rampant sexual harassment and gender bias. Ferguson, whose population is 58.6 percent female has four female officers too. That detail shows up in a footnote. As the Washington Post which caught the foot note reported, stark gender imbalance is the norm for the overwhelming majority of local police forces, even though twenty years of research shows that women police officers tend to rely less on physical force and far less frequently get involved in misconduct lawsuits. Way back in 2000, a study released by the Feminist Majority Foundation and the National Center for Women & Policing documented a huge gender gap in police brutality lawsuits, and it’s costly. In the 1990s, reported the study, the City of Los Angeles paid out $63.4 million in lawsuits involving male officers for use of excessive force, sexual assault, and domestic violence. By contrast, LA coughed up just $2.8 million for female officers for use of excessive force, and not one female officer was named as a defendant in a sexual assault or domestic violence lawsuits. As cases of abuse continue, racial discrimination will stay in the headlines as it should, but police patriarchy deserves more than a footnote. Will a diverse police department solve all our problems – surely not – but if we’re going to address diversity, let’s remember there’s more than one sort. The evidence suggests that shrinking that gender gap just might save both lives and money. You can watch my interview with Alicia Garza of the Black Lives Matter movement this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at GRITtv.org. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 What's the Economy For? Community or Control? Lessons from Hungary 3:00
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3:00Communism, capitalism; I just spent a week in Hungary, where anyone in their 50s has spent more or less equal parts of their life under each system and what many of those people find surprising now is just how little has changed. As one resident of Budapest, exclaimed with a sigh: “Twenty five years after the transition, the one thing we didn’t expect was for so much to be the same.” It’s a cautionary tale for those in the US who talk about creating a “new” economy. Just what's really new about it? In the late 1980s, my Budapest friend and her colleagues believed they were about to make a new world. To some extent they did; they travel more freely now and can start their own businesses. With Western encouragement, Hungary’s state owned companies were mostly privatized, its cooperative farms split up. But instead of redistributing assets into more hands, Hungary’s merely passed from one, one-percent to another. Today Starbucks, McDonalds and Tescos are a common sight on Budapest's broad boulevards but so are homeless people, beggars and the unemployed. Eurostat, a data firm, reports that more than a quarter of Hungarians were living in extreme poverty last year. And the old practice continues of playing politics with people’s needs Today’s power elite dispense shrinking benefits and scarce public jobs just as the old regime passed out perks and favors to their allies. To explain the pain, right-wing demagogues blame familiar targets: among them, gypsies, queers and Jews. In his State of the Union Address this year, Prime Minister Viktor Orban attacked immigrants, foreigners and multiculturalism (as well as communism) and called for a higher birth rate for Hungarians. Did Hungarians hope for more? For sure, and gradually they’re figuring out how to get it. As I left, hundreds were in the streets protesting corruption. But the big picture is that while ownership in their new economy has shifted from public to private hands, the question they have to grapple with now, is what’s the economy for? For community or control? You can watch my interview with Judy Wicks co-founder of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies and former owner of Philadelphia’s White Dog café, this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at GRITtv.org. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Hi I’m Laura Flanders of GRITtv. Conservatives need to figure out where they stand on local power. Their views present a paradox, suggested The New York Times recently. Causing the confusion are so-called pre-emption laws passed by states to stop local governments from enacting their own policies. Eight states have passed laws scuttling local sick days rules. More have sought to pre-empt local regulations on things like local contracting, big box retailing and non-violent drugs. Most doggedly, the well-endowed National Restaurant Association has worked to block cities from raising restaurant workers' wages. The business lobby’s cabal, the American Legislative Exchange Council has made passing pre-emption laws a priority, and Republican dominated state legislators have gone all out even as they jaw on about conservative values of individual liberty, don't tread on me and the evils of big government. Hence the quandary. Curious: are conservatives for local control or against it? The answer’s a lot more simple. Big business sees the writing on the wall. Even citizens in red states like Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota voted overwhelmingly for raising minimum wages last time around. Philadelphia recently became the 20th place in the states to enact a law guaranteeing workers paid sick days. In the same month, after rallies and protests and thousands of emails from state residents, New York’s Governor Cuomo announced a raise for his states 400,000 tipped workers. Cuomo knows a popular move when he sees one. Especially given the deadlock in DC, voters want local government to take power back from far-off legislators and corporations. So it's no wonder that groups like the NRA and ALEC have turned cold on local power and big on big govt preemption. Paradoxical? Not really. When it comes to government, we've bought a myth that there are high moral principles at stake: big or small, federal or local? As the unseemly hypocrisy over pre-emption laws reveals, the fight’s really over power. And politicians, especially conservative ones, will squirm through no end of contradictions to keep their hands on it. You can watch my interview with Johann Hari, author of Chasing the Scream, The first and Last days of the War on Drugs this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at GRITtv.org. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Hi I’m Laura Flanders of GRITtv, for the Progressive Voices channel on Tune-In Hillary Clinton effectively entered the 2016 presidential race this week with a major speech to a women’s conference in Silicon Valley. Word is, she’s decided to make gender even more central to her campaign this time around. In California she did just that; she also exposed the incredible whiteness of her feminism, which reminds a lot of us just why her last campaign was so painful the last time. Just seconds after she was introduced (as “a modern day suffragette”) Clinton made very clear that her idea of America was a limited one: “Our country is a great entrepreneurial experiment,” she began, founded by “pioneers” and “new patriots” like her ancestors. No acknowledgement there that the most successful early entrepreneurs were enslavers; their capital, captured people, their land seized from native Americans. People of color don’t tend to omit that part of the story of “our” country. The erasure is a familiar sign of whiteness. Clinton went on to bemoan the sexism of Silicon Valley where only four of the top 100 investors are female and 83 percent of tech jobs are held by men. But the same percentage of workers is white. Would a more gender-equal whiteness be acceptable? Given the history of white people who’ve said yes to that, Clinton has a responsibility to be explicit. I’m not even going to get into Clinton’s reference to former Secretary of State (“my friend Madeline Albright” who apparently once said “there’s special spot in hell for women who don’t help other women,” even as she endorsed sanctions that led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi women and children in the 1990s. (That’s not my idea of feminist foreign policy.) We have an uprising happening in this country which we didn’t have eight years ago. And thank heavens for it. It’s led by women of color many of them young queer and trans women who don’t find it so hard to hold race and gender in their minds simultaneously. Theirs is a capacious vision of justice with room enough for everyone. Does Hillary Clinton really think the women of mobilizations like #blacklivesmatter and #whywecantwait aren’t watching, listening and hearing their exclusion? And does she really think she can get elected without them? As she herself said in Santa Rosa, “inclusivity’s more than a buzzword or a box to check. It’s a recipe for success.” For Barack Obama that was literally true: while he lost the white women’s vote, women of color gave him the edge to get elected. But inclusivity’s not really the point. Nor is winning. What we need, and we need desperately, are leaders who are honest about right-now-existing privilege and power; how things got set up this way, and what we might do to redistribute those so as to give us all some chance of surviving and making a less divided 21st Century. You can watch my interview with women leaders from the Philippines and Kenya this week on the Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINK Tv and TeleSur and see all coverage of this topic and more at GRITtv.org. For GRITtv and the Progressive Voices Channel on Tune In, I’m laura flanders.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Uber Wants to Reorganize the Economy? Workers, too Can Play at that Game: 3:02
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3:02Hi I’m Laura Flanders of GRITtv, for the Progressive Voices channel on Tune-In The global newswire Associated Press announced this January that it will no longer refer to the app-based cab-hail service Uber, as “ride-sharing.” The move follows criticism that services like Uber and Lyft are very far from sharing; they are taking more than they’re giving. That’s certainly the view of Bhairavi Desai co-founder and director of the National Taxi Worker’s Alliance. Desai told GRITtv this week that while it characterizes itself as an innovative disruption, Uber’s more like Walmart on wheels. They’re not democratizing the workplace, she said, they’re de-regulating it or rather, re-regulating it, to the benefit of app-owning bosses and the detriment of drivers. Minimum guaranteed wages, health and safety insurance, and the chance to negotiate collectively. Taxi drivers fought decades for those protections, said Desai. Now in comes Uber. Behind the sharing spin, what’s it really want? She says, “It’s nothing less than the reorganization of the economy.” The worker contributes the car, the gas, the training and the risk, and in return for being called an “independent contractor” they make more or less the same money as they would working for a fleet. They make pick up more rides, more quickly, and drive more hours, but that should raise real safety concerns. Doug Henwood reporting for The Nation found taxi drivers in Chicago and Los Angeles making around $12 hour after expenses – about the same as other drivers. Former driver Jon Liss writes that “for all the convenience Uber may offer its users, one of its primary byproducts has been the degradation of working class jobs that once generated a living wage.” Nor, as Liss points out, does Uber have any responsibility to serve everyone, only the smartphone clutching, credit-card swiping few, even as prices soar and taxi supply shrinks for the rest of us. That said, the status quo wasn’t perfect for taxi drivers pre-Uber, any more than it was for part-timers pre Wal-Mart. The bosses’ pitch – that workers can be partners, sharers, associates (the euphemisms mount) works not only because people are desperate, but also because being a worker’s never brought with it the economic power or cultural pride in race-to-the-top America that it has in countries where unions have been less devastated. But Uber et al better watch out. Today, the Taxi Workers are at work on their own app. And as we report in our latest documentary, Own the Change, hundreds of taxi drivers are becoming worker-owners by creating their own worker-owned companies – like Madison’s Union Cab, a co-operative. Redesign the economy? Two can play at that game. As Desai says, “I love a good disruption but I love it in favor or poor people and working people.” You can watch my interview with Bhairavi Desai and see Own the Change at GRITtv.org and find out more there about the syndication of The Laura Flanders Show on TeleSUR English and LINKtv. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
U.S. President Barack Obama has ordered a review of the distribution of military hardware to state and local police. That's a relief. Now can we have a review of the distribution of military influence throughout US society? What we’ve learned so far is that under a federal program, more than $5 billion worth of military equipment has gone to more than 8,000 city and state agencies since 1997. I found out this weekend that one small town not far from me received six military HumVees for a police department where just 25 officers work. Mine-resistant trucks aren't the only war tools showing up in US suburbs. Take those gunshot wounds. Michael Brown, the unarmed teen shot by a police in Ferguson August 9, was shot six times, twice in the head. Ever wonder why so many gun shot victims show up with multiple bullets in their flesh? It’s certainly the cop; it’s also the gun. As the Atlantic Magazine reported this summer, every time that Congress pays a military contractor to develop a new killer weapon for the battlefield, it almost at once shows up at High Street gun shops – and in Hollywood movies, like Lethal Weapon 1,2, 3 & 4. Obama’s review has been sparked by public shock at images from Ferguson, but what do people think happens when war profiteers dominate the marketplace, the media and Congress? There’s a lot of surplus out there because defense contractors lobby for it. The top five companies spent more than $65 million last year persuading Congress to cancel promised cuts. As a result the 2014 budget gave them everything they asked for, including the controversial F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the most expensive weapons system ever, and a tank that we already know that nobody wants. Weapons makers don’t just do war work of course. Lockheed Martin, the maker of that costly fighter, has also snapped up government contracts to do data collection for everyone from the Postal Service and IRS, despite a history of fraud. Now the country's SWAT teams are lobbying to keep their military surplus and there’s about to be more of it because Congress is already hearing the Pentagon’s $555 billion budget for next year, isn’t enough, in light of the threat posed by the Islamic State. That's good news for the SWAT teams and probably for ISIS. In Syria and Iraq, ISIS has seized an arsenal of US military gear -- even more than the Ferguson police! So by all means yes, let’s examine the surplus program. But let’s not stop at that. While we’re at it, Obama says the review will be done by White House Staff and “relevant" agencies including Homeland Security and the Departments of Defense. We can guess what will come of that. How about the residents in towns with all this firepower review the program? Especially the ones who’ve been shocked, not just by the images, but by the experience of having police point assault rifles at their heads. For GRITtv, I'm Laura Flanders…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 A Mountain Is Not A Beach: Media Rules on the Middle East 3:00
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3:00Hi, I’m Laura Flanders of GRITtv on the Progressive Voices Channel on Tune In. “I will not compare slaughter to slaughter. I will not compare death to death. I will not compare I will not compare… “ Welcome to my morning mantra. It’s been a long hot news summer and it’s important to remember the rules. Under prevailing US media law, you may not compare a killing to a killing. You may not say the word Palestinian for example and then in the same sentence, say Yazidi. You may not compare. You may not compare… The rules are very clear, especially when it comes to the Middle East. I, for example, may not compare destruction to destruction. It is best, in fact, if I do not even contemplate or wonder about men and women and children trapped without food and medicine and drinking water under siege on a mountain top, and at the same time, contemplate or wonder about men and women and children trapped without food and medicine and drinking water under siege on a place near a beach. A mountain under siege is not to be compared to a beach besieged. That’s simple enough. After all, a mountain is very different from a beach. I will not compare. I will not compare… In particular I will not compare a destroyed mosque in Mosul with a destroyed mosque in Khuzaa. And I absolutely will not compare the motivations of the uniformed soldiers whom I hear laugh and cheer on a videotape out of Gaza as they explode that mosque in Khuzaa, with the motivations of any men anywhere committing war crimes.- Even if I can’t get that laughter and cheering out of my head. I may not compare, I may not compare. Why? Because comparisons are odious, of course, and politics is complicated. You heard the president, the U.S. "cannot and should not intervene every time there’s a crisis in the world.” Some require the U.S. to act to help the people besieged. Some require the US to act to help the people doing the besieging. To compare is to risk blurring the differences and the differences are all important. To recap the rules: it is wrong to compare. You can not say: a life is a life. You can not say words like oil and money and markets. You can not ask what’s the difference between a mountain and a beach. I’m Laura Flanders. Today’s commentary is dedicated to the late great poet June Jordan. Find out more about her at June Jordan .com and see more from me at GRITtv.org, including an interview with long time civil rights activist Dorothy Zellner about her work now for peace and justice in the Middle East. GRITtv is seen on the new, news channel TeleSUR English - for a new perspective. From GRITtv, and The Laura Flanders Show, I’m Laura Flanders…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
President Obama addressed a Town Hall meeting the other day, to announce the expansion of an important initiative on racial justice. The room was packed and all sorts of people were there including members of the National Basketball Players Association. The subject was mentoring and record keeping and bringing public and private resources together to help all young people reach their full potential. Except the president didn't talk about “all” young people; he only talked about boys and men. And that’s the most obvious problem with his new initiative. You can start with its name: My Brother’s Keeper. What about the sisters? As my colleague Kimberle Williams Crenshaw said in an op-ed in the New York Times this week, when the president talks about families, he stresses the central importance of women. “Anything that makes life harder for women makes life harder for families and… children,” he told a White House summit on working families earlier this summer. And yet when the subject switches from family and so-called "women’s" issues to race, the president focuses only on the male half. Now no one is denying men of color face specific challenges, says Crenshaw, but while racism may affect boys and girls differently, it certainly doesn’t affect girls any less. Quoting her again, “Like their male counterparts, black and Hispanic girls are at or near the bottom level of reading and math scores. Black girls have the highest levels of school suspension of any girls. They also face gender-specific risks: They are more likely than other girls to be victims of domestic violence and sex trafficking, more likely to be involved in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, and more likely to die violently.” So what would be so bad about My Brother’s Keeper adding sisters? At the president's Town Hall meeting this July it was announced that along with $300 million dollars of investments by foundations and private corporations like AT & T and The Discovery Channel, the NBA is creating 25,000 mentors for? boys of color as part of the president’s new program. I bet the WNBA could be persuaded to offer a similar program for girls, don’t you? It all reminds me of a book that came out years ago, in the early 1980s, with the title, “All the Women are White and all the Blacks are Men....” The message was simple: it’s time to end the invisibility of women of color and stop the splitting of race from gender. It is now, surely, way, way beyond time. You can see my newest interview with Crenshaw and some of her colleagues, and sign your name to a letter calling for the expansion of My Brothers Keeper at GRITtv.org. And sign up there for our e-newsletter. For GRITtv I’m Laura Flanders.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Not so long ago, as I watched the World Cup soccer final, I couldn’t help but wonder where the referees are when you need them -- in the Middle East, for example? The final soccer match between Germany and Argentina was close; tied until the bitter end, with lots of heads smashed and jerseys tugged and at least a few intentional-looking kicks and trips by the players. By the time Germany scored, in overtime, the referee had handed out four yellow cards for deliberate or dangerous foul. The players all play innocent. The ref still puts them on notice. Three fouls and you’re off. The crowds hoot and holler, millions strong, but everyone understands the same rules apply to everyone. While I watched safely in Brooklyn, Palestinians in Gaza watched the game under bombardment. Simply watching while Palestinian can get you killed under the Israeli bombing campaign that’s been raging. Just a week earlier, an Israeli missile struck a café in Gaza City killing eight of the twelve people who’d come out to watch the world cup semi final. Israel claims its bombardment is a legitimate response to the abduction and murder of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank, allegedly by Hamas. But where’s the referee? At the end of a week of bombing hundreds of rockets had been fired on Israel from Gaza,, but they’d caused no direct killings. The Israeli attack, on the other hand, had killed at least 175 Palestinians, among them, 36 children and 24 women. Seventeen thousand people had been displaced, by bombs that damaged or destroyed 940 homes -- in a tiny place. The Gaza Strip is barely twice the size of DC. Half its population is 18 years old or younger. Some people did speak out: a spokesperson for the U.N. high Commission for Human Rights said Israel’s attacks likely violated international law. The UN Security Council demanded a ceasefire, but no one sent any one off the field of international relations for committing foul. To the contrary, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a ceasefire, "not even on the agenda”. Hamas has made a ceasefire contingent on Israel lifting its eight-year blockade of Gaza, and the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. The bombing continued and, a few protests aside, the world was mostly silent. But imagine: what if one World Cup team could simply pulverize the other with no ref calling foul? It would be a boring game to watch and the outcome would be rather predictable. The fact is, we need more than red and yellow cards from the refs and world refs with real rules that apply to everyone. We need world public attention, and noise as large and as loud against this ill-matched, deadly conflict, as we heard, the world over, for football. For more commentaries from me and interviews with forward looking people, go to GRITtv.org and sign up there, to join us. I’m Laura Flanders.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Revolution Now: Common Sense Asks Why Not? 3:00
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3:00July 4th, Independence Day, is coming up and I’ve been thinking about Thomas Paine. “These are times that try men's souls,” wrote the American revolutionary in 1776. But you’ve got to wonder. The rule of mad King George and the Royal East India Company was bad. But is the rule of the mad Big Banks and the Corporate Congress better? Paine’s Common Sense is widely credited with giving the war of independence its rhetorical juice and vision: if Americans wanted to enjoy unity, equality and independence, he said, they’d have to throw off kings, and unaccountable colonial corporations. In the England of his youth Paine witnessed what happened when the rich fenced off and privatized what had been common land. A few landed families grew ever richer, while the poor lost every decent means of self-support. Aboard a merchant ship, Paine met sailors who had been “impressed” or forced into service. He worked with others who had been enslaved. His first writings from Philadelphia were against colonialism and slavery. Britain has, he stated, done little but “rip up the bowels of whole countries for what she could get.” Skip forward to today and our wars are ripping up their share of bowels. Have any doubt? Just look at Iraq. Our congress of the very rich has so shrunk the options for the poor that 46 million Americans live with poverty and another 7 million of us are locked up. Americans may not be forced to serve in their military or their jails, but when there's no other route to schooling or a decent wage, it may not be impressment, but it’s close. Of the gap between rich and poor in his day, Paine wrote: “The great mass of the poor in all countries are become an hereditary race and it is next to impossible for them to get out of that state of themselves…. This situation, he wrote, “is absolutely the opposite of what it should be and it is necessary that a revolution should be made in it.” The great mass of today’s poor are in a similar fix. Those that have wealth invest, while the rest can only work. Invested wealth compounds; wages do nothing much. Corporate cartels rig prices, favor monopolies and turn every aspect of our social lives into commodities for trade: from our homes to our thoughts and our “friends” and our “likes”. Tottering on the brink of commotion and disturbance “the mind of the multitude is left at random.” Wrote Paine. In our times, police and drones and detention camps keep a cap on commotion - and our most powerful media -- brought to us by the makers of those drones -- tell the mind of the multitude we live in a democracy. We live in times that try our souls for sure. Are we in revolutionary times? The only question is why not. Happy Independence Day! For more commentaries from me, and interviews with the Thomas Paines of today, go to GRITtv.org and sign up there, to join us. This week, LGBTQ activists Kate Clinton and Urvashi Vaid on what makes revolutions and revolutionaries irresistible. I’m Laura Flanders.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
I’m beginning to think the American Left is a lot like Eeyore. Our favorite food is thistles. Give us a week in which something extraordinary is won and we cheer for an instant before retuning to gloom. On June 2, Seattle's City Council unanimously approved a minimum wage hike to $15 an hour, more than double the federal minimum. The vote came amid a sea of dismal data showing how wage stagnation increases inequality and a chorus of righteous hand-wringing about the dire state of our democracy. Just two days after the Seattle council voted, researchers at the Economic Policy Institute, released another report showing how growing productivity has not shrunk national poverty because the wages are too damn low. Thomas Piketty’s been in the headlines for weeks, with his charts showing how, in our finance-driven capitalist system, the rich keep getting richer and the poor poorer because when it comes to financial returns, Main Street simply can’t compete with Wall St. A new documentary about the Koch Brothers describes what people and corporations with mega-wealth can do to keep things that way: ban unions, vilify poor people, trash-talk government, then buy yourself a Congress and a Court. That should do it. At the release of the EPI report in Washington, Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America let rip: "It's not going to matter what our policy ideas are if we don't build a working class democracy movement.... This democracy is literally in the trash can. " He said. "We keep pretending its not but it is." A whole lot of people in Seattle have not been pretending. They weren't happy with the stagnant $7.25 federal minimum wage or with President Obama's proposed hike to $9 either. Despite the talk of falling skies and economic crises, they joined the call raised by fast food and Wal-mart workers for $15 an hour, and with union support, they got $15 an hour on the ballot in the Seattle suburb of SeaTac last November. At the same time, Kshama Sawant, a Socialist challenger to a same-old-same-old incumbent Democrat made a city-wide $15-an-hour minimum the central focus of her campaign for seat on Seattle’s City Council. She won and SeaTac won, and within weeks of her taking office, Seattle's Mayor and every single council member was voting in favor. They’d seen the polls: audacious organizing had turned the tide. As Sawant says, the law's not perfect. It doesn’t come in fast enough and it’s flawed by corporate loopholes, but heck, it's a victory worth celebrating. Keep chewing on your thistles if you like, but remember, Eeyore also had a fondness as I recall for pots you can bang on and red balloons. For interviews with audacious organizers who are building economic democracy across the country, check out GRITtv with Laura Flanders on YouTube or at GRITtv.org. For GRITtv, I’m Laura Flanders.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 What About North Dakota's Man-Made Tornado? 3:00
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3:00If you’re going to get hurt in a North Dakota man camp you’d better make sure it’s by a tornado. In fact, when a 120-miles per hour twister tore through a group of homes on Memorial Day making national news, it was probably the first time most Americans had heard the words "man camp". Some kind of exotic preserve? No. A man camp is what they’re calling the hastily assembled trailer parks that house workers, mostly men, who’ve come to North Dakota looking for good paying jobs in the oil fields. Some man camps resemble military barracks, with row upon row of identikit homes. Others look like something the wind actually blew in: clustered trailers, trucks and cars in someone’s scrubby back yard. On Memorial Day the tornado that bore down on a camp south of Watford City pummeled residents’ only escape. “There’s nowhere to go,” said one breathless guy who captured the whole thing on his cellphone. He was lucky. The twister left nine wounded, 15 RVs in rubble and an unnamed 15 year-old girl in hospital with what were described as critical injuries. Now county officials and oil company guys are discussing how to make life safer for man camp dwellers. But how about making the Bakken region safer for everybody? Take homelessness, since 2010, MacKenzie County, where the tornado hit, has seen its population rise 72 percent. Housing was scarce before the boom, now workers are sleeping in cars even tents. Have you seen North Dakota in winter? Sitting at a casino bar on the Fort Berthold reservation this month, one oil rig worker kindly listed to me the places close-by, where women, as he put it, would have to be “crazy” to enter. The casino was fine, he said, until after midnight. I could always go down to the local drive-through liquor store. Are you ever afraid to sell to a person behind the wheel, I asked the sales clerk at one of those. Sure I’m afraid, the young man said, but it’s not worth the fight. “I sell and I pray.” Not reassuring. To see a daily slide show of truck and oil rig wrecks go to Bakken Oilfield Fail of the Day on Facebook. And bear in mind, the Bakken oil is the especially flammable variety. Much of the Bakken oil lies beneath tribal land. The US Attorney’s office has just announced an initiative to address the rise of violence against tribal women, but so far the data’s hard to come by. Cedar Gillette, a former domestic violence counselor in New Town on the Ft. Berthold Reservation told me the hotline is overwhelmed. Native women are especially vulnerable she said, because, like the land, there’s little accountability. Sometimes it takes police hours to reach women in the camps because they don’t know where the man camps are. We know a lot about the tornado now. Its speed, its route, its likely recurrence, and local officials are responding rapidly. Seven years on, why is it taking so long for officials to respond to the man-made tornado that’s hit North Dakota? You can see my interview with Cedar Gillette and find a link to Oil Field Fail site at GRITtv.org. I’m Laura Flanders of GRITtv.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 To Repair the Environment, Rehabilitate the Body Politic 3:01
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3:01Hi, I'm Laura Flanders of GRITtv. I've been out of commentary mode recently, in part because I've been recovering from knee surgery and in part because I've been traveling. In early February I tore a tendon. Painful, but fixable, once I decided to actually do something about it. The shocker about knee surgery isn't the surgery, it's the preparation in advance and the recovery afterwards. But right after the knee drama I was on the road, in Kentucky for a story about coal, and then in North Dakota for my first glimpse of the Bakken oil boom. You could say, I've been on a slightly limping tour of the fossil fuel economy, complete with physical therapy and ice packs. What did I learn about knees? Get them in good shape before you operate and they'll recover pretty well. I'll take a little trauma over an injury that's just going to weaken the whole system. As for the economy. We're limping along. The beautiful mountains of Kentucky are looking pretty battered from all the mining, and the same could be said of the rolling plains of North Dakota. They're dotted with drilling rigs, hundreds of them, pecking away at the landscape. Environmentalists aren't wrong to urge us to break with fossil fuels but it seems to me that it here's very little chance of fixing the environment if, like the knee, we don't first strengthen the body politic. Consider Kentucky. There, they're talking about the first $100 million senate race in a state where poverty tops 30 percent in some coal counties. No one ever loved the extraction economy but the same industry that poisoned the water put food on the table. $100 million could do a whole lot to strengthen the muscles of an alternative. Up north, the Bakken oil fields just produced their billionth barrel of oil, 80 percent of it from North Dakota. Alongside the drilling, there's the flaring. Millions of cubic feet of natural gas are burnt off day and night into the atmosphere. Local people are concerned about the price they're paying for the boom, but it's hard to deny the profits to people who've already endured more than their fare share of damage. in the Bakken Shale, the richest deposits of oil seem to fall beneath tribal land, belonging to three Native American tribes who lost 150,0000 acres of their most fertile fields when when the Army Corps of Engineers chose right here to dam the Missouri River. Environmental trauma is not only on its way, it's here already, but there will be no environmental repair without a whole lot of political rehabilitation. In the mean time, I'm back home in a city that burns up a ton of fuel and I'm not changing my habits. Without refrigeration, after all, where would I get those ice packs? Gain without pain... As the physical trainers say, it's our favorite delusion.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Chokwe Lumumba's Solidarity Economics: Not Black or White, Just Smart 2:59
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2:59It’s one of the exasperating things about our not-so United States. When white people in the North protest inequality outside city hall, it may take a while but eventually they’ll get noticed. Remember Occupy? When black people in the South, by contrast, organize for years, elect one of their own and actually take over City Hall with a concrete plan, they can be in office for months without most Americans having heard of them. Which makes it makes it particularly sad that Mayor Chokwe Lumumba of Jackson Mississippi passed away last week, before most people had any chance to hear what he was up to. Mayor Lumumba wasn’t your run-of-the-mill mayor. He came up through the furnace of the 1960s as a defense attorney, a community organizer and a founder of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. In our race-trained world, we’d call his ideology Black Power, and maybe that’s why so few even in our progressive/left media have paid attention, but what do those words even mean? After years of civil rights laws, we’ve done away with legal apartheid, but we still live in a bitterly divided society. Lumumba’s goal was colored black and rooted deep in the blood-soaked Mississippi soil, but it was a vision of power: building some, and then using it, not to fit in, but to transform a flawed society. And wouldn’t that have made it of interest to a whole lot of Americans? What made this moment ripe for change was the readiness of the people, Mayor Lumumba told me in one of his last interviews. His slogan was an old one: The People Must Decide. After a term on the City Council, Lumumba’s people organized their hearts out to elect him mayor and he took office last July not just talking about reducing poverty and inequality, but with an innovative plan to do just that through public works carried out by local firms, and government support for new, low-barrier-to entry worker-owned businesses and cooperatives. What Lumumba called solidarity economics isn’t a black thing or a white thing. It’s a smart thing. Owned and managed by the workers, co-ops permit poor members to pool resources and share risk; they tend to provide higher wages and better benefits and create stability in their communities. Around the country, lots of people wish their city officials would integrate worker owned co-ops into their plans and policies. But Jackson, under Lumumba, was actually doing it. There’s a conference this May, called Jackson Rising. By then the city will have a new Mayor. Will Lumumba’s vision survive him? He’d be the first to say the People Must Decide. But I bet they’d appreciate some financial support. There’s something in Jackson’s experiment that’s good for everyone. Black or white; it’s a power thing. To read a transcript of my interview with Lumumba, recorded February 12, go to GRITtv.org or Yes Magazine. I'm Laura Flanders, for GRITtv.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Hi I'm Laura Flanders of GRITtv. You often hear that progressive causes are trapped in competing "issue silos", so it’s worth celebrating when those silo walls crack and people come together, as they did February 14th for VDay, a global day of action against violence against women. For the last couple of years, the anti-violence movement VDay has called on people to rise and dance on February 14th. This year the One Billion Rising campaign was dedicated to rising for Justice. In the lead up, I was invited to host a series of public events, talking about what justice, in fact, might look like. To our panels, we invited leaders from a range of movements. Among others, indigenous rights activist Sylvia McAdam, said justice would be respect for native women, and their land and water. Richmond CA, Mayor Gayle McLaughlin said that justice would be people holding corporations to account. Anti-incarceration activist Susan Burton said justice would look like fewer people locked up and more living free from assault and addiction. Community organizer Ashley Franklin said her just world include safe and affordable public transportation. Actress Olivia Wilde imagined more movies with more kinds of smart women, leading. You get the idea. In terms of outcomes, on February 14, a whole lot of people rose and danced everywhere you can think of, at prisons and parliaments and toxic dumps. You can see the pictures at OneBillionRising.org I was particularly moved to hear that some of our panelists had linked up: Susan Burton held a rising at a women's jail in South Los Angeles and Ashley Franklin and her colleagues came. In Richmond, Mayor McLaughlin marched with Sylvia MacAdam's group, Idle No More, to a local refinery to demand respect from Chevron. Maybe Olivia’s got an idea for her next movie. It made me think about connection; Our movements lose momentum when we fail to grasp the intersectional nature of oppression, says my friend the brilliant law professor Kimberle Crenshaw. To which I’d only add that we make progress when we connect, not our causes, but the conditions of our lives. It reminds me of EM Forster’s book Howards End in which the female heroine, Margaret Schlegel, takes issue with her businessman husband’s chilly, calculating way of thinking. She is “fighting for women against men,” she thinks at the start, but mostly she’s just arguing for imagination enough to feel affection for others. “Only connect” says Schlegel in Forster’s book. “Live in fragments no longer.” She’s not talking about bullet points but connecting as people. To see how our lives are related through pathways of power, and place, economics, environment and experience we first have to give one another close attention. What happens next? Vday’s founder Eve Ensler says one word came up more than any other as people considered justice. Love. Justice apparently looks like caring. And to care, we have to meet. And pay attention. And maybe dance. For more from me, and to watch clips of the entire State of Female Justice Panel series, go to GRITtv.org and sign up there to join our mailing list.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 AOL's CEO IS Not the Only One who Should Be Shamed 2:59
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2:59Hi, I'm Laura Flanders of GRITtv. Not long ago it was the Great Recession, today it’s Obamacare that’s serving as a convenient scapegoat for employers seeking to tighten the screws on their workers. This week saw AOL's chairman and CEO, Tim Armstrong announce a stingy plan to shrink employee benefits, that would have saved his shareholders millions even as the company’s financial reports showed healthy growth and profits. Armstrong blamed it all on rising healthcare costs, uncertainty, and of course, Obama. But then he went on to make some creepy comments about worker’s costly sickly kids, and failed to provide a shred of credible proof that AOL was actually feeling any pinch associated with healthcare. At the end of the week, Armstrong was forced to back down. Owners of the Huffington Post, AOL is a consumer-dependent company in a crowded market that’s pretty receptive to public shaming. So score one for all that public shame and for the AOL workers. But thousands of companies haven’t backed down, even as they’ve suppressed wages and benefits, regardless of good earnings, not for a year or two or to weather a storm, but steadily, incrementally over decades. The spoils for investors are rich: fewer workers, lower wages, shrunken benefits, a more precarious workforce. And the blame’s shifted about: once it was global competition, then the EPA, then the credit crunch, now it’s Obamacare. From a winners' point of view, what's not to like? The proof of the gains for the one percent rest in the fact that the even as the gap between rich and poor has grown faster than in any other developed country, the top one percent in the US has captured ninety-five percent of all growth since 2009. The president and congress keep talking about recovery and jobs bouncing back, but there's no structural change on the table, no new economic tools, no new worker rights or regulations -- certainly no reparations that might re-balance the sweat-profit equation. The losers are weak, the winners are strong and the blame keeps shifting about, pointing anywhere but at the board rooms and the corner office. The AOL debacle shows shame can sometimes work. At GRITtv, we’re doing our bit to keep it coming. Last week we interviewed half a dozen New Yorkers about their lives at work. Whether they had jobs, or were looking for them, they were all working too darn hard. You can watch their stories at GRITtv.org or on our facebook page. Are you Working Too Damn Hard? Tell us about it. No really, tell us – post your story in any format you want, on our facebook page. It’s time we did some of our own finger pointing. You can find GRITtv at http://GRITtv.org. For GRITtv, I’m Laura Flanders…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 To Truly Address Inequality, Build a People-Centered Economy 3:01
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3:01Hi I’m Laura Flanders of GRITtv. President Obama got one thing right in his State of the Union address. "It is [we] the citizens who make the state of our union strong." Just look at his speech. After years of saying the word poverty less than any president in memory (and talking about the middle class more), here was Obama talking about low wage-stifled workers, and inequality. That’s thanks to public activism. "Inequality has deepened"; "No one who works full time should ever have to raise a family in poverty". The president’s best applause lines came from protest signs. Now “citizens” (and would-be citizens) will have to come up with solutions too, because his won’t take us very far. Take that minimum wage hike for federal workers. Ten dollars and ten cents an hour is nice, but $20,000 a year is hardly a ticket out of poverty, even if you can find a full time job in the public sector. Yes! Magazine held a live Twitter-fest during the President’s speech. Lots of people wrote in, with solid suggestions for how to make much bigger changes. To stop the shrinking of the public sector for example, union members said bring jobs back home. The feds reportedly spend $1.5 billion a year buying clothes overseas. Instead of subcontracting to sweatshops why not buy American? The President talked about stimulating manufacturing by attracting businesses to high-tech ”hubs”. But if government's going to give tax breaks and cash to private firms why not demand an ownership share for the taxpayers? If the public’s going to carry the risk, we should also see the profit. President Obama’s support for natural gas came in for criticism. Gas isn’t "a bridge fuel" they said, or if it is it’s another bridge to nowhere. We’d be far better off investing now in wind and solar which will pay off handsomely. And create green energy companies that are owned by the public and dilute the power of the enormous oil and gas corporations. The Tweet that sticks with me most came from George Goehl at National People’s Action. He wrote: "There are three paths we can take 1) Fight to preserve the little we have left 2) Work to revive the old economy or 3) Reimagine what's possible." As President Obama said “We all owe it to the American people to say what we’re for, not just what we’re against.” There’s also a responsibility to listen. Many Americans are saying loudly what they’re for. And they’re making it happen. At GRITtv and Yes Magazine, we’re calling it #Commonomics, and I’m reporting on a slew of efforts to build people centered economies, that serves people and the planet. As George says, it is possible to make a more fair world out of our old broken economy, but not if we only tinker. And not if we wait for the President. As Obama said, the union’s strength lies in its people. You can find my coverage of #Commonomics on www.GRITtv.org or in the pages of Yes Magazine.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 On Giving Tuesday, Giving's Never Been Easier, or Cheaper for Global Corporations 3:01
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3:01It’s "Giving Tuesday" on December 3. Following Black Friday, on Giving Tuesday people all across the United States will be kicking off the holiday season not with shopping, but with giving. In just its second year, Giving Tuesday is attracting thousands of participants large and small. Whenever haves help have-nots that’s worthy of praise. Still, when massive global corporations want praise too, I get a little queasy. Don’t get me wrong, GRITtv is viewer supported. We’re all for charitable giving and every day, we’re reminded of just how much generosity is out there. This year, an anonymous donor enabled us to hire a third team member and start a podcast. We thank that donor daily. But the massive corporations taking part in Giving Tuesday aren’t anonymous. They want positive pr, and for that they deserve serious scrutiny. Take Verizon. For Giving Tuesday, the Verizon Foundation will contribute they say to three large non-profits as per the votes of Verizon workers. The company calls it giving back and “giving voice” to employees. Call me cynical, but I bet most Verizon workers would have preferred more voice and fewer give-backs in their contracts. Over the last decade Verizon’s forced concessions on everything from wages to pensions to job security and the right to organize. Giving Tuesday’s nice but Verizon workers give back every day. IT’s the same with Google. Google’s co-hosting a Giving Tuesday "Hangout-a-thon” for charities and socially conscious businesses. Lovely, but if they had a real social conscience, Google would let less of its wealth hang out in tax shelters. Last year, Google dodged about $2 billion in income taxes by funneling revenues into a Bermuda shell company. What they give on Tuesday will be pennies on what they’d owe if they were to pay their fair share on tax day. And poor taxpayers might need less charity. At Microsoft, well, at Microsoft, they’re matching dollar for dollar the contributions given to a group of youth charities on Giving Tuesday. It must be some mistake, but I’ve read the site five times and it seems to me that the tenth most profitable corporation in the world has set a goal for the GivingTuesday campaign of just $50,000. As the Verizon Foundation puts it, on Giving Tuesday “giving back has never been easier.” For huge corporations, it’s also never been cheaper. For more qualms about charities, check out my interview with Peter Buffett who says philanthropists like himself should aim to put themselves out of business. You can see all GRITtv's interviews, free at www.GRITtv.org. And if you are that anonymous donor, Thank you again. Anyone out there want to fund that staff person for a second year? For more information on GRITtv and how you can be a part of it, go to GRITtv.org.…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
1 Catastrophe or Crash? Welcome to the Carbon Bubble 2:59
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2:59When the UN’s climate chief told a meeting of coal executives this month that most of the world’s coal reserves will have to stay in the ground if we want to perpetuate life on the planet, we should have heard a shudder on Wall St. But we didn’t. Investors keep on trading in fossil fuel as if there‘s no tomorrow but there will be for carbon, if the governments of world ever get serious about capping emissions. It may not have happened at this month's stymied climate talks in Warsaw, but when they walked out of those talks, civil society groups pledged to get a whole lot less civil, and sooner or later governments are going to be forced to pass new regulations. The world is simply running out of the amount of greenhouse gas we can emit before we warm the climate beyond the point of no return. We may well be there already. The same UN Climate Chief who polarized with activists, was pretty plain spoken with the coal companies. Christiana Figueres urged the energy execs to “honestly assess the financial risks of business as usual.” Not morality, not weather, not refugees or wars, Figueres was talking about finances here, because if you’re a coal company your finances are tied up those fossil fuel reserves. They’re the core asset on your balance sheet, but only if you can burn them. If you have to leave what Figueres says needs to be about 75 percent of that coal in the ground to prevent the world from overheating that means lopping that same amount off the value of your company. Al Gore got grief when he wrote about this in the Wall Street Journal. He’s not an economist the critics said. Figueres isn’t a banker either, but on GRITtv, on the eve of the UN’s climate talks, we talked to a man who is. John Fullerton began his career as an oil and gas banker before rising to manage global capital markets at JP Morgan. If we’re serious about not trashing the planet, energy companies need to agree to take a write-off of $20 trillion dollars, said Fullerton. That makes the $2 trillion sub-prime mortgage melt-down seem trivial. World markets went into a near global depression when a whole lot of mortgage backed derivatives turned out to be junk. Imagine what will happen to pension funds when BP and Exxon stocks shrink by three quarters. The only way out is a massive shift by companies, governments and investors. We're facing what Fullerton calls a "big choice" between a climate catastrophe or a financial one. What’s needed, said Figueres, is a “deep, deep transformation”. Do you think we should leave that in the hands of the same people who've failed to take action so far? It’s just another reason not to let our governments continue to be led around by corporations. Those civil society groups better be very serious about becoming less civil. You can find a teaser of my conversation with Fullerton on YouTube. If you want to see the interview in full, sign up for my mailing list at GRITtv.org…
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The F Word with Laura Flanders
Far be it from me to distract from the important blaming and shaming around the Obamacare website. But if we do have a minute left for our actual health, can we talk about the radiation threat that seems to be soaring on the Pacific? So as not frighten anyone unduly, I’ll quote the calm people at Reuters: “The operator of Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant will as early as this week begin removing 400 tons of highly irradiated spent fuel in a hugely delicate and unprecedented operation fraught with risk.” That’s Reuters. Nuclear researcher Harvey Wasserman says things more to the effect of “What the F'ity F F?" The point is, since an earthquake and tsunami that hit the Fukushima Daiichi Plant in March of 2011, the fuel rods at Reactor Number four have been in dangerously delicate shape. They can’t heat up, be exposed to air or break without releasing deadly gas, but the cooling pool they’ve been resting in is leaky and corroded by seawater and could never withstand another tremor or quake. Starting any day now, Tepco, or Tokyo Electric, going to begin plucking more than 1,500 brittle and potentially damaged fuel assemblies out of where they are and placing them in new casks. Each assembly contains some 50-70 spent fuel rods, weighs around 660 pounds and measures 15 feet long. And I did mention the pool is 100 feet up? Operations like this are usually done by robot, but here it has to be done by hand because the rods are out of place and the pool’s still littered with junk. In the GRITtv studios this week Wasserman compared the operation to the fairground game of lowering a clunky mechanical claw into a crowded glass box to snag a prize. I for one, usually drop it. It’s important we do more than hold our breath. After years of mistakes, cover-ups and fibs, nuclear watchers don’t want to give TEPCO another chance. 150,000 have people signed a petition calling for the world to take over at once. It’s certainly a world problem. Tepco has already admitted that 300 tons of toxic water are belching into the Pacific every day and as long as a year ago, Oregon State University researchers found traces of Fukushima cesium in West Coast Fish. What next? We can’t afford to wait to find out. For the very latest from me, and to be one of the first to see what Wasserman had to say about the world’s worst nuclear accident, sign up to join my mailing list at GRITtv.org. That’s WWW.GRITtv.org.…
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