Laura Flanders and Friends: Solutions-Focused Progressive Perspectives on Politics, News, and Culture

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! The F-Word, Laura Flanders' commenta...

The media layoffs are here. It's new media’s sky-is-falling moment. Instead of the promised golden age, we're seeing rolling cutbacks and massive layoffs at digital darlings like Vice and Buzzfeed. Is that it, for workers rights? Are unions any match for advertising pressure from Google and Facebook? Music Featured: “The Awakening” by 4 Hero featuring Ursula Rucker. Support theLFShow ! Guests: Kim...

CDFIs grew from church basements and kitchen tables to number more than 1,000 institutions with billions of dollars of capital. Joining us to explain just how CDFI’s make a difference - from inner cities to Native American reservations, is Clifford Rosenthal , an internationally recognized developer of programs to provide financial access for low-income and underserved people, and author of the ne...

Regulation, degradation, shaming, blaming - enough! Is it time for sexual liberation yet? We talk a lot about sex but not often enough about pleasure, On today's show we try to make up for that and hear from some bloggers, activists and educators who are practicing very positive consent.  Music Featured:  Allies And Enemies by Zara McFarlane on Brownswood Music;  Free by Ultra Naté.  Support theLF...

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 eve n 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...

Days of wonder, days of rage. We're living through an information revolution as profound as any since Gutenberg and the printing press, but are we the people, the so-called "users", using the technology or is the technology using us and for what ends? How can we harness this particular transformation for good? That’s the question, and we have some answers. Guests: media theorist and auth...

Reinventing our cities and re-enchanting the world. Who gets a say in designing where they live? What if more of us did? This week, we visit Mary Miss, a Guggenheim fellow and celebrated artist, whose organization, The City as Living Laboratory , strives to empower people to create not the cliché of the sustainable city, she says, but places of living and breathing, creative sustenance. Then we sp...

"We need to take a long, hard look at the ideology that underpins what we call capitalism," Laura Flanders' commentary, The F-Word. Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. By becoming a member, you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content! Become a member today.   Laura Flanders and Friends Crew:  Laura Flanders-Executive Producer, Writer;  Sabrina Artel-Sup...

Amazon’s HQ2 in New York City's Long Island City neighborhood of Queens is off. In a conversation recorded before the news broke, we looked at the resistance the plan provoked and why, and considered how development might be possible without displacement? The conversation featured Sasha Wijeyeratne , Executive Director of CAAAV organizing Asian communities, Juleon Robinson , Program Associate of t...

Like 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. Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. By becoming a member , you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content!   Laura Flanders and Friends Crew:  Laura Flanders-Exe...

As the President sounds off about holy babies born and unborn, we talk about the ongoing criminalization of women who happen to get pregnant. What has been the media’s role and have they done enough to make amends? We’ll talk to Lynn Paltrow , one of the lawyers representing incarcerated women, media critic Janine Jackson , and Suzanne Sellers who fell afoul of one of those laws in the 1990s. Then...

"It shouldn’t take a week without heat during a polar vortex and hour after hour of hands hammering on windows for hours to sound an alarm about conditions in federal lock up." Our goal is to thrive, not just survive. By becoming a member , you sustain our independent, and grassroots-driven content!   Laura Flanders and Friends Crew:  Laura Flanders-Executive Producer, Writer;...

When you live in the rural South, your story rarely makes the news, but Southern activists are shaking things up, with their votes, and their broadband transmitter too. This week, Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson and Rev. Allyn Maxfield-Steele, the co-directors of the revered civil rights school, t he Highlander Center , talk about blue waves, black women and broadband. And we revisit Detroit, where resi...

Is the climate movement heating up? This week on the show, activists at all levels of the climate justice movement discuss how inter-generational, cross-coalition, and global organizing is taking control of the future without waiting for anyone. Can the U.S born Green New Deal learn from yellow-vested workers’ agitation in France? And who’s new Deal is it anyway? In this episode: Elizabeth Yeampie...

The following minicast features Laura in conversation with Thomas Hanna, research director at The Democracy Collaborative and author of “ Our Common Wealth:  The Return of Public Ownership in the United States ”.  They discuss public ownership. From banks and parking meters to water and electrical supplies, there's more of it in the US than you might think. Who’s afraid of it and what are they afr...

As the World Economic Forum takes place in Davos, Switzerland, we talk about the way central banks steer world development and for whom. Former Goldman Sachs managing director Nomi Prins, author of " Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World ," and public ownership researcher, Thomas Hanna, author of “ Our Common Wealth: The Return of Public Ownership in the United States ,” and Re...

Soul Fire Farm ’s Leah Penniman talks with Chris Hedges, author of America: The Farewell Tour , about environmental threats, societal breakdown, and how we might come back together as humans. Then, a glimpse of CAGED , a play written and conceived by Hedges’ writing students in a high-security prison in New Jersey. Music featured: “Babylon Falling” by Thievery Corporation from their album Temple o...

Despite efforts over the last two years to curtail progress for trans people by the current administration, trans activism has gained momentum and become prominent within the movement for queer justice. Laura speaks with Imara Jones, a trans activist, former policymaker, and host of The Last Sip on Free Speech TV about her work to amplify transgender narratives, on and off the screen. Music featur...

Holiday Rewind: Since the 2008 financial crash, one thing we've learned is that there exist in the US not just one economy, but many, as well as many kinds of economic actors. From platform cooperatives to cryptocurrency, people are building economic alternatives to climate devastation and capitalist extraction. So says Nathan Schneider , crusader for the internet of ownership and author of Everyt...

Holiday Rewind. Food — from where it grows, to where it goes, all of it matters to our bodies and our communities. A conversation about how farmers are creating equitable food systems inside cities, from urban agriculture to worker-owned cooperatives. Guests: Susan Chin-Design Trust, Karen Washington- Rise & Root Farm and Ysanet Batista- Woke Foods . +Excerpts from Peter Coffin's "Music f...

Farewell to America, or just to this year? This week, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Chris Hedges explains why President Donald Trump is just the predictable end of a long sad history of American avarice and greed. Then, Reverend Billy celebrates the season with not buying, but boisterous singing. Hear what happened when he and his partner Savitri D. did bid farewell to America and took their rioto...

"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!   Laura Flanders and F...

Looking back on the midterm elections, we ask the tough questions about white women voters and race, then get introduced to the hi-pinky salute across the border. We meet the co-founders of SURJ, Showing up for Racial Justice , and speak with Grammy Award Winner Arturo O’Farrill . Music spotlight “Line in the Sand” from “ Fandango at the Wall : A Soundtrack for the United States, Mexico and Beyond...

Where do we begin to think about food? Is it about how we grow it, how we eat it, or who has access to it? Isn't it all of it? However you put it, food is as political as it gets. Today, we'll hear from farmers, organizers, workers, and seed-keepers who all attended the NESAWG conference on food justice in late October. Among them, Leah Penniman whose beautiful new book, Farming While Black: Soul...

HUD 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.   Laura Flanders and Friends Crew:  Laura Flanders-Executive Producer, Writer;  Sabrina Artel-Supervising Producer; Jeremiah Cothren-Senior Producer; Veronica Delgado-Video Editor, Janet Her...