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

Can a socialist choose Hillary over Bernie? Playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner discusses Socialism, Zionism, Hollywood, and the 2016 elections. Tony Kushner has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards, two Academy Award nominations, and President Obama presented him with the National Medal of Arts in 2013. Last fall he was entered into the National Theater H...

This week Laura and Viggo Mortensen​ discuss heroes, outlaws, empires and justice in the Middle East. Academy Award-nominated actor Viggo Mortensen has appeared in scores of movies, including The Lord of the Rings Trilogy​, one of the highest grossing film series of all time. What you may not know is he's also a poet, photographer, musician and painter. He speaks four languages, and he is the foun...

Laura, discusses race, gender, feminism, and socialism with author Zillah Eisenstein. And an exclusive report from the Damayan Cleaning Cooperative, the first Filipina migrant worker-owned cooperative in the US. And a few words from Laura on the path forward for a new economy.   Laura Flanders and Friends Crew:  Laura Flanders-Executive Producer, Writer;  Sabrina Artel-Supervising P...

From sex workers in the US to prisoners in Guantanamo, artist and journalist Molly Crabapple has been there. Her bold and powerful work has also taken her to Abu Dhabi's migrant labor camps, and with rebels in Syria. Her new memoir, Drawing Blood , was just released in December. She is a contributing editor for VICE and has written for publications including The New York Times, Paris Review, and V...

Six years ago this month, Haiti was hit by a devastating earthquake. Billions of dollars in aid were pledged but little made it to the people in need. Why did that happen? Today on The Laura Flanders Show, Antony Loewenstein talks about Disaster Capitalism and the great Caribbean feminist Jacqui Alexander gives us a rare interview. All that and a few words from Laura on laissez faire capitalism  -...

Today on The Laura Flanders Show: Naomi Murakawa indicts liberals for growing the system of mass incarceration, and we take a look back at our coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement. All that and a few words from me on mandatory minimums in 1790 and since.   Laura Flanders and Friends Crew:  Laura Flanders-Executive Producer, Writer;  Sabrina Artel-Supervising Producer; Jeremia...

The Laura Flanders Show in in Los Angeles talking about women and work. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas shares about her work with the Black Workers Center, and we visit with domestic workers who marched to Washington to meet with the pope. All that and a few words from me on the surprisingly low-cost emergency that can throw almost half of all Americans into a crisis.   Laura Flanders and Friends Crew...

Eric Mann from The Los Angeles Bus Riders Union talks about why working people from LA are attending the climate talks in Paris. And Ecuador's former Finance Minister Pedro Páez on when they renegotiated loans, cut debt payments and reinvested in the local economy. Plus a commentary from Laura on lessons learned from a 19th century African statue.   Laura Flanders and Friends Crew:  Laur...

Land and food has been used as a weapon to keep people of color in second class status, in this episode Laura looks at the ways it can be used as a tool for liberation. Laura speaks with Jalal Sabur & Raymond Figueroa, who are using fresh food to rebalance the scale and dig up the school to prison pipeline. Jalal Sabur is the co-founder of the Freedom Food Alliance, a collective of farmers, po...

The “surveillance-industrial complex” has profound, but poorly understood impacts on our political, structural, economic, and cultural lives, says Hamid Khan, director of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, board member of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, Political Research Associates, and Youth Justice Coalition. Also in this episode, we meet the students that forced Columbia Un...

Can one of the founders of the craft website Etsy.com  - valued in the billions of dollars - lead a change in the way we do business? Etsy.com is the world’s largest certified socially responsible business, and they have now launched Etsy.org , a business education program for businesspeople who want to make a better world. Laura speaks with Matthew Stinchcomb, the Vice President of Values and Imp...

Like all men held at Guantanamo Bay, Mohammed el Gharani, who was imprisoned at the age of 14, is barred from entering the USA. But American artist Laurie Anderson found a way to bring him to the states, via telepresence. Laura talks with Anderson about presence, absence and the questions raised in Anderson’s latest attention-getting performance, Habeas Corpus. We also hear from el Gharani, who wa...

The climate crisis is our best chance to build a better world - and the people most affected by the destruction are in the forefront of coming up with alternatives. We'd better listen to them. That's the message of a new film from this week's guest, Avi Lewis, director of the new film  This Changes Everything , inspired by the bestselling book by his wife Naomi Klein. Avi Lewis co-created and host...

Mercy - more and more people are talking about it in the context of the masses of Americans incarcerated. but is mercy enough? Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, has done a lot to push this debate to the front. Also in the show - how you can be a part of EJI's history marking project. Plus a few words from Laura on the high cost of giving a cold shoulder to the...

How does race and racism affect in your life? Anti-racist activist and writer Tim Wise is the author of six books, most notably his highly acclaimed memoir: White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son. His latest book, Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich and Sacrificing the Future of America is out this month. Also, New Orleans youth discuss how racism affects the...

Professor and author Greg Grandin talks about the enduring influence of Henry Kissinger's bloody and brutal foreign policy. Greg Grandin has been examining Empire in all its forms across seven books, including his latest, _Kissinger’s Shadow, _out this month. A professor of history at NYU and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Grandin writes on US foreign policy, Latin America,...

Will the future be better or worse for workers? Peter Frase says with more tech tools, there's more leisure in our future, as there should be. He also is convinced that capitalism will end. Peter Frase is an editor of the magazine Jacobin, and has a book coming out next year from Verso Press,  Four Futures . Also on this episode: Part two of our interview with Boots Riley, a poet, lyricist, MC, sc...

Fighting government repression through art and action: Laura interviews Ellen and Rachel Meeropol, a mother and daughter each seeking change -- one through the litigation and one through fiction. Ellen Meeropol is the author of two novels that deal with law, justice and government surveillance. Her most recent book,  On Hurricane Island , explores a fictional secret domestic detention camp for cit...

How do we break America's addiction to guns and gun violence? We talk with a young man who served ten years in prison on a gun-related crime and hear from cultural critic Jeff Chang about the cultural changes that have and haven't transformed America. Marlon Peterson spent his entire 20s in prison, charged with second degree murder, and convicted of attempted robbery and assault. Five years after...

A look at the historical and present-day connections between democracy, land, housing and economic development. The history of the US is packed with people of color and poor people who’ve been stripped of their rights - to vote, to wages, to housing or even just the right to stay in the country -  through incarceration, segregation, slavery and deportation. For just as long, black communities have...

Will labor endorse Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, or someone else? Larry Hanley began driving a bus in 1978, at age 21, in Brooklyn, NY, and attended his first union meeting soon after. He’s now international president of the Amalgamated Transit Union which represents some 200,000 bus drivers, rail operators, mechanic and station attendants across the US and Canada. Since his election in 2010, h...

Ten years since the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, we look at the recovery, what worked and what didn't, with an extended interview with a former insider turned outsider. Oliver Thomas was city council president at the time of Hurricane Katrina, and was on his way to becoming the city's next mayor. Within a few years, he serving time in a federal prison, having pled guilty to tak...

What might a global Black Lives Matter movement look like? A discussion with Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi, a Black feminist writer, communications strategist, cultural organizer, and co-founder of the BlackLivesMatter Network. She is also executive director of the US' leading Black organization for immigrant rights, the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. Also, we look at Chicago's s...

A conversation about capitalism with two brilliant minds, Cornel West and Richard D. Wolff, together in a rare joint appearance. Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, and author most recently of Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens: Essays on the Global Economic Meltdown 2010- 2014/ Dr. Cornel West has written or edited dozens of books, including classics like Ra...

This week's episode focuses on modern warfare and US imperialism. Is drone warfare here to stay? It’s one of the few things Republicans and Democrats agree on. Andrew Cockburn has been a rare critical voice on the subject. He is the Washington editor of Harper’s magazine and the author of several nonfiction books on war and international politics. His new book is Kill Chain: The Rise of High-Tech...