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 h...

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 P...

Hi 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 censo...

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, wa...

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 s...

Former 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 campa...

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...

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, mo...

The 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...

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...

Imagine: 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 th...

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 per...

The 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...

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 fo...

Hi, 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 w...

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 potentia...

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, i...

July 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 ind...

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...

If 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 hous...

Hi, 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...

It’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 A...

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...

Hi, 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 he...

Hi 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 p...