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

How do we shape our future, right now? Author and architect Keller Easterling discusses the role architects should take to shape a better world, and the invisible systems used by corporate power to exert control over populations. Also in this episode, we speak to scientist Helen Caldicott about facing the nuclear threat. All that, and a few words from Laura on police and women in crisis: the real...

Safety: every law enforcement officer and every politician tells us that they're for it. And yet for many, police are a problem in their communities, and today's policies are only making things worse. If what we're doing isn't the answer. What is? We explore this issue, and what we all need to learn from the disability justice movement, with this week's guest. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a...

Protests against police violence continue across the US, and this week's episode continues our exclusive reporting on the movement behind the protests. How are the legacies of the eras of slavery, reconstruction, and Jim Crow still with us today? Laura talks to civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar Michelle Alexander about citizenship and the prison industrial complex. Michelle Alexande...

How is the Black Lives Matter movement reshaping models of social movement leadership? We continue our ongoing conversation on Black Lives Matter with another of the movements cofounders, Patrisse Cullors. Patrisse is an artist, organizer and freedom fighter. She is also the founder and executive director of Dignity and Power Now, based in Los Angeles. Among her projects are the Coalition to End S...

The two state solution has been declared dead too many times to count. But have we turned a corner? In the last Israeli elections, Prime Minister Netanyahu raised alarm about Palestinian citizens voting, and declared his opposition to a two state solution. This week's episode airs 67 years after the founding of the state of Israel, known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or tragedy. To mark the occasi...

In 2014, a 12 year old Georgia girl faced expulsion and criminal charges after writing on a locker room wall of her Middle School. A Detroit honors student was suspended for her entire senior year for bringing a pocket knife to a football game. In 2013, an 8 year-old girl was arrested for acting out. A 12 year old girl was threatened with expulsion unless she changed her hairstyle. Those are just...

Many people know of Mumia Abu-Jamal as a journalist and political prisoner. But did you know he’s also a Star Trek fan? That’s one of the many revelations in the new book Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, a collection of visionary fiction from Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Maree Brown. Adrienne Maree Brown is a writer, organizational healer, facilitator, pleas...

This week is US tax week, a good time to ask what will it take before we have a mass movement in the US offering economic alternatives. We explore this question with two guests who are in the trenches of the new economy movement. Stacy Mitchell is co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and directs its Community-Scaled Economy Initiative. She is the author of Big-Box Swindle: The True...

Where do art and social justice meet? From early roles in films like Bob Roberts and Five Corners to her award winning roles in plays including Wit and Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, to her current starring role in the award-winning Showtime series The Affair, Kathleen Chalfant is one of the most acclaimed actresses in the US. She has also been an outspoken advocate on issues like Middl...

Jesse Hagopian is part of a movement challenging the regime of high stakes testing in U.S. schools. Global Warming, war, poverty, violence against women, disease... None of these problems can be solved by A B C or D thinking, he writes in a new book, so why do we continue to sink hundreds of millions of dollars into just that sort of test? Jesse Hagopian teaches history and is the Black Student Un...

Alicia Garza is the co-creator of Black Lives Matter, and also Special Projects Director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She helped start "Black Lives Matter" as a call to action for Black people after the killing of 17 year old Trayvon Martin. Women are at the heart of this movement. Specifically young Black women - many of them calling themselves queer. We talk about what t...

With marijuana legalization passing around the US, are we finally entering the last days of the War on Drugs? Johann Hari had an early start as an op-ed columnist for The Independent at 23. Since then, he has written for the New York Times, the LA Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, Slate, the New Republic and The Nation among others. His new book,  Chasing The Scream , is a bracing look inside the War...

In celebration of International Women's Day, GRITtv featuring leaders of the global women's movement, Agnes Pareyio and Monique Wilson plus a look at women of color's fight for rights with Standing on My Sister's Shoulders and Hillary Clinton's White Feminism with Laura's F-Word.     Laura Flanders and Friends Crew:  Laura Flanders-Executive Producer, Writer;  Sabrina Artel-Supervis...

Ai-jen Poo, Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and Co-director of the Caring Across Generations campaign, has been organizing immigrant women workers since 1996. In 2000 she co-founded Domestic Workers United, the New York organization that spearheaded the successful passage of the state’s historic Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2010. As Co-director of Caring Across Gene...

The US media has been breathlessly reporting the spin about Uber, the $40 billion dollar car service that until recently was called "ride-sharing" by the AP. Bhairavi Desai, co-founder and Director of the Taxi Workers Alliance, presents the other side - including Uber and similar services' effects on the California cab industry, and workers' rights and the changing face of "work&quo...

A short documentary in partnership with Toolbox for Education and Social Action. Watch as we go through concrete steps for building economic alternatives by creating worker-owned cooperatives. Featuring conversations with worker-owners from Union Cab; Ginger Moon; Arizmendi Bakery, Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA); New Era Windows; and more. For supplementary materials from T...

Is the economy recovering, or is the system itself the problem? Economist and philosopher David Harvey on money; which he calls "the great corrupter". Professor David Harvey is one of the world’s leading Marxist thinkers and most prolific writers on class warfare, capitalism, crisis and how we find our way out. Harvey has also coined key social movement concepts, such as the idea of &quo...

Why is it so hard to invest your money locally? Grassroots activists trying to build economic alternatives in the US encourage investing in the businesses in your neighborhood, instead of in far-off corporations. However, it turns out that it’s not so easy to move your money; there are even laws against it in the US. Laura Flanders talks with local finance expert Michael Shuman, and profiles a gra...

What is the fallout from Obamacare on the movement for universal healthcare, and is there any hope for change in the US electoral system? A discussion on organizing within the system with Chuck Pennacchio, Executive Director of Health Care 4 All Pennsylvania and founder of Citizen Solutions for Pennsylvania. He was also a 2006 US Senate candidate. He’s a longtime advocate of publicly-financed, pri...