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Laura Flanders is the host of "GRIT TV" the new, news and culture discussion program aired daily on Free Speech TV (Dish Network ch. 9415) and online at the popular blog site Firedoglake.com. Flanders also hosts RadioNation, on Air America Radio, the weekly radio program of the Nation Magazine. She is the author of Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics Back from the Politiicans (The Penguin Press, 2007) and the New York Times bestseller BUSHWOMEN: Tales of a Cynical Species (Verso, 2004), an expose of women in George W. Bush's Cabinet. Flanders was founding director of the Women's Desk at the media watch group, FAIR and for more than ten years she produced and hosted CounterSpin, Fair's radio program. For more information and to contribute video to GRIT TV go to www.grittv.org.
SHARE Saturday, July 7, 2018 Jeff Sessions Sets Back the Clock
Pay no attention to what the media says about how undermined Jeff Sessions is. President Donald Trump may bait him publicly via tweet, but in private, at the Department of Justice, Sessions is a man on a mission to roll back civil rights. And that's just what he's doing.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 11, 2018 WTF White Women?
2016 was bad. 2018 was worse. While 52 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump and Mike Pence in 2016, in 2018, 76 percent of white women voted for Brian Kemp. So white women are either stupid or spoiled. I say spoiled.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 16, 2020 Democracy vs Dictatorship: Don't Let Bloomberg Muddy That Choice
The 2020 presidential race didn't get decided this week, but the choice before us did: more democracy or less of it. That's the decision we are facing, and if the Democrats manage to foul this up, they may not get another chance.
SHARE Monday, December 31, 2018 Arundhati Roy on Fiction in the Face of Rising Fascism
The thing is, people spend so much time mocking Trump or waiting for him to be impeached. And the danger with that kind of obsession with a single person is that you don't see the system that produced him. What would happen if he wasn't there tomorrow and Mike Pence came? Would it be better?
SHARE Saturday, August 17, 2019 Woodstock Urges Roaming
Radical journalist Andrew Kopkind wrote about the Woodstock Peace and Music Fair in August 1969, just days after the event. "When we find out we have to fight for love, all hell will break loose," he wrote. 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?
(9 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 27, 2018 Is Donald Trump Responsible for Violence? Yes.
Trump. Complicit in killing? Absolutely. This president's closer to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates than any other, and he's stayed that way, not only since the demonstration assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, but over almost four years of a Saudi air war that's created what the UN calls the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
SHARE Tuesday, June 18, 2019 In Barcelona, Being a Fearless City Mayor Means Letting the People Decide
Led by former housing activist Ada Colau, who was elected Mayor in May 2015, Barcelona's government has been in the hands of a movement that had become a political party -- Barcelona en Comú. They won office on a pledge to "develop the city as a commons," meaning a place for people, not a profit center for speculators and extractive corporations.
SHARE Sunday, March 29, 2020 Forward Thinking on Covid-19: Lebanon
In this interview, activist Dayna Ash breaks down the people's response to Covid-19 and the fight for justice in Lebanon. "Losing hope is a privilege we cannot afford," she says. "We will continue. We will push forward..."
SHARE Saturday, March 10, 2012 The Strange Sticking Power of Rick Santorum
A big part of how Obama gained support in states like these was his pledge to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. (Although in office, he quickly jettisoned all that talk and signed more, similar pacts.) Rick Santorum, for all his sins, has the advantage of actually having voted against NAFTA.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, July 17, 2020 As Trump Moves to Hide Covid-19, We Already Know Which Communities Are Suffering Most
There was another skirmish this week when the administration ordered hospitals to send their COVID-19 data not to the Centers for Disease Control, where it's publicly available, but rather to the Department of Health and Human Services, where it will be stored in a database that is shut to the public.
SHARE Sunday, March 10, 2019 Making American Journalism Great and Different
Local papers have taken a hit. There's no debate about that. The 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.
SHARE Monday, November 5, 2018 Hate Speech at Homeland Security
Someone, most likely in broad daylight beneath half a dozen surveillance cameras, felt confident enough to write "KILL NIGGERS" in capital letters on what has got to be one of the most highly policed blocks in the world. Who? Will we ever know?
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 21, 2018 Healthcare Isn't Big Business Or Big Philanthropy! -- Ben Palmquist and Dr. Steffie Woolhandler
US healthcare is still in crisis. Over 30 million Americans remain uninsured, and even more are sickened by sky-high insurance costs. This January Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon announced that they were banding together to form a new healthcare... entity.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, January 29, 2021 Time to Take the Mittens Off!
For those who have been paying attention to something else, in the days after the Biden/Harris inauguration, a picture of Vermont's Senator Sanders siting masked and in mittens went viral.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 2, 2020 Take On the Tech Mob Now or Perish
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.
SHARE Wednesday, April 8, 2020 Mutual Aid Justice: Beyond Survival
Transformative justice applies the principles of mutual aid to justice. It seeks to resolve violence for the long term at the peer-to-peer, grassroots level by looking for resolution, not punishment, and relying on community, not the system.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 28, 2018 Amazon Gives to End Homelessness? That's Rich.
They call it Giving Tuesday, and we've just marked the seventh annual this week. It's supposed to kick off a season of charitable giving, but the way some corporate robber barons use it for public relations is enough to turn your stomach.
SHARE Wednesday, June 10, 2020 Paradigms Take Years to Shift
Defund Police. Invest in Black Lives. What just weeks ago was a slogan is fast becoming law. Minneapolis City Council has voted with a veto-proof majority to replace law enforcement with a "transformative new model of public safety."
SHARE Friday, May 25, 2018 After Brexit, Blexit: Putting Your Money Where Your Life Is
Brexit's what the British public voted to do when they felt the European Union wasn't serving their best interests. Blexit's what some Black residents of the Twin Cities have decided to do to free themselves from the city's white dominated financial institutions.
SHARE Wednesday, May 6, 2020 Covid-19 Demands A National Reckoning
The U.S. already has over one million confirmed cases of Covid-19 and tens of thousands of deaths. Victims of the disease are disproportionately black and working class. What explains our failure to build a more caring state?
SHARE Sunday, November 10, 2013 Bill de Blasio: A Mayor for the New Economy
The most significant aspect of de Blasio's win may be the route he took to power. Taking office with him this January will be a public advocate who generally shares his views and a dozen new progressive city council members -- all beneficiaries of a long-term strategy by local advocates of economic justice to reduce local legislators' dependence on establishment-party patronage and big corporate donors.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, May 21, 2018 Life or Death for the FCC
Reverse net neutrality? Open the floodgates to more media monopoly? Chairman Pai, a former staffer to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has in mind to accomplish all that and more. He leads the commission's Republican majority in lockstep, and they've already proposed radical reductions to Lifeline, the meager subsidy that helps low income people connect to doctors, nurses, and public assistance.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, March 2, 2012 Drone Strikes? What's To Feel Bad About?
Between 282 and 535 civilians, including 60 minors, have been credibly reported as killed as a result of drone strikes since US President Barack Obama took office.
Most damning, the Bureau reported that at least 50 civilians have been killed in follow-up strikes after they rushed to help the wounded. More than 20 other civilians were killed in strikes on funerals.
SHARE Tuesday, July 31, 2018 Ominous Silence on the Anniversary of the ADA
The Americans with Disabilities Act turned 28 this July. The ADA was signed into law on July 26th, 1990 by the first President Bush. It prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in all areas of public life.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 30, 2019 Collusion in Plain Sight
The media has no reason to worry. There's plenty of collusion in plain sight, and it wouldn't take a 22-month inquiry to find Trump conspiring with enemies of US democracy, if only the US media spent a fraction of the time they've spent covering Russia-gate looking at Trump's relationship with killer corporations and hate groups.
SHARE Wednesday, May 22, 2019 Special Report: Whose Economy Is It? Ours.
New York City faces the serious challenges of any major city, specifically when it comes to inequality and climate risks. But with democratic majorities at both the city and state level in government, addressing those challenges is more possible now than it's been in decades.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 8, 2018 HUD Official to Move Into Public Housing?
The federal housing official responsible for the New York City region says she plans to move into public housing to spotlight inhumane conditions, but if she really wanted to spotlight inhumanity in housing, she'd move big money out of precious city housing stock.
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 7, 2016 Laissez Faire Capitalism -- That Is Anything But
"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.
(7 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 19, 2017 Wake Up, Liberals -- Either We Hang Together or We Fall Apart
There's one thing people on the left need to get deadly serious about under the Trump administration, either we hang together or we hang apart. Donald Trump and his supporters are deadly serious about harassing, intimidating, villifying and removing all those they consider subversive. And their immigration program is just a start.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 11, 2018 After Maria: Puerto Rican Self-Determination
What's in store for Puerto Rico's future? Some people are pushing to privatize everything from education to the power grid. In the massive gaps left by our official response, individuals, communities, and organizations are stepping in.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 7, 2020 If the President had HIV, He Could be in Prison
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.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 8, 2018 What if Ida B. Wells Depended on Facebook?
From Paine to Wells, it has always been media at the margins -- not the center -- that has brought critical issues to a boil so that bigger, "recognized" media could inhale the steam. American democracy has not advanced thanks to the mainstream media, but rather thanks to reporters on a mission and with the means to tell the uncomfortable, unfamiliar, uncommon truth.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 5, 2018 Throwing Shade, Not Light, on Youth Voting
The seasonal downpour is especially important this year because, for the first time, 18-35-year-old "millennials" -- and their even younger counterparts, "generation z" -- will be America's single largest voting block with power to swing the result if they actually turn out to cast a ballot. The perennial question is, will they?
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, June 4, 2010 Poor Americans Are Drowning: Where Are the Lifeboats?
For all the talk of Wall Street reform, and new consumer protections, and talk of alternative energy policy, the fact remains that for most people, America is a sinking ship. And minority communities are the first to be thrown over the side.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 23, 2018 National Suicide Point?
Colonizers cut down fruit trees and olive groves and uprooted relationships to break apart autonomous social networks. Smash society and you create craven people. Craven, from the early English word meaning crushed, defeated, overwhelmed.
SHARE Wednesday, April 4, 2018 Monopoly Capitalism: At The Breaking Point?
Monopoly capitalism may be on its last legs! This week, economist Michael Hudson joins us to say his predictions on the Trump budget have come true and seem to suggest, more than ever, that capitalism is not only a disservice to the people, but it's also unsuccessful.
SHARE Saturday, May 14, 2016 Who Needs Panama When You Have the Home State of Joe Biden?
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.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 28, 2016 Who Cares if Hillary is Warm? I Care About Her Wars
When it comes to Clinton, it's not the warmth, it's the wars I'm worried about. 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. 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.
SHARE Sunday, February 27, 2011 Crushing Workers in Wisconsin Has National Effects
Inside the dark Victorian mansion of the Bradley Foundation in benighted Milwaukee, there must be smiles all around. The same ideologically-driven outfit that paid for the task force that devised Thompson's welfare plan is now backing Walker's drive to criminalize collective bargaining.
SHARE Tuesday, February 26, 2019 Time For Socialist History Month?
his primary campaign is not going to be about where Democrats stand on things like abortion and marriage and voting rights, but rather on where they stand on property rights and public ownership and workplace democracy and taxes. Much as they're out of practice, journalists are going to have to grapple with economics.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, May 1, 2016 Lucy Parsons: The Anarchist and Intersectional Feminist Who Inspired May Day
Lucy Parsons 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.
SHARE Friday, April 8, 2016 The Primaries Are Over: Don't Give In To Panic And Mute
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.
SHARE Thursday, November 19, 2020 The Media's Quadrennial Eclipse
It's the quadrennial eclipse. Every election season, our picture of power momentarily opens up to include something resembling a society before it snaps back to narrow in on a few so-called "power brokers" in Washington and on Wall Street.
SHARE Friday, March 4, 2016 Dark Money: What Might the Money Media Cover If They Weren't Covering Trump?
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 10 years. As the Brennan Center reported this January, just one justice shifting opinion could speedily restore common sense limits on big spending.
SHARE Tuesday, June 21, 2011 The supreme court's free pass on sexism for Walmart
The world's biggest boss, supported by companies as diverse as Altria, Bank of America, Microsoft and General Electric and backed up by the godfather of big business (the US Chamber of Commerce) has persuaded the US supreme court that thousands of women workers can't possibly share enough of an interest to constitute a class?
SHARE Thursday, March 17, 2016 A Great National Sick-Out -- It's Past Time
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 student's bathrooms, mushrooms on their classroom walls, leaking ceilings, moldy food.
SHARE Thursday, November 12, 2015 Money Media Cover Change-Makers Most When They're Dead
When media 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 Grace Lee Boggs don't just make trouble -- they make change.
SHARE Thursday, April 22, 2010 The F Word: Coal Company Shopping Spree
Massey Energy killed 29 miners, Standard & Poor upgraded their stock from "hold" to "buy," so Shrub got it right, the answer to anything bad is "go shopping."