The F Word with Laura Flanders

"We declare the right of the people to the ownership of the land and the unfettered control of our destinies.” Sounds familiar? It's not the US Constitution, it’s the Proclamation signed by Irish rebels 100 years ago this April. In 1916, a few thousand Irish men and women armed with pikes and poorly working rifles took over the center of Dublin and declared a provisional government. Their Republic...

Happy Easter everyone! Have you ever noticed how — US Constitution notwithstanding — churches occupy a pretty special place in our society? Just consider the upcoming holiday. If there’s a Christian church in your hood, chances are, you might see a street cleaned up or closed for a parade, or a police officer assigned to mind parishioners. That work’s done by public workers, by the state - which i...

A picture’s worth a thousand words they say, and that was certainly the case earlier this year when public school teachers in Detroit started tweeting out pictures of the crumbling schools they work in. 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, th...

Think you can tell the difference between a city and a business park? It may not be so clear. A corporate buying boom since the financial crash is gobbling up city property and leaving us with places that are literally not our town. Purchasing took off after 2008, when foreclosure rates were high, bank loans were drying up, and record levels of commercial properties were standing vacant. Last year...

Dark Money, Super PACs, shady multi-millionaires buying your democracy. When Americans were asked recently what they fear most, it wasn’t terrorists (unless you mean the sort that take over your TV at election time.) It was corruption of government officials. It’s that fear that a certain multi-millionaire megalomaniac is playing into when he says "I’m so rich I can’t be bought - so vote for me."...

The Supreme Court is considering the most important labor case in years. Friedrichs vs. California Teachers Association, ostensibly addresses public workers rights on the job, specifically their right not to support their union. The plaintiffs argue that the sum they pay to the union that represents them violates their free speech and free association rights. In their view, they shouldn’t have to...

Half way through Tony Kushner’s play, Angels in America, two old Bolsheviks consider the prospect of the future in a scene set in the Kremlin on the verge of the end of the Soviet Union in 1985. "The great question before us is: are we doomed?” says one. “Will the past release us…? “ Thirty years later, as Europeans reel from financial shock, austerity, and the biggest inward migration surge in me...

Primary season is in its prime and feels familiar in almost every respect. Eight years on, it’s the same candidate, the same point of contention. Is Hillary Clinton warm enough? I’m not debating that this is sexist stuff: all this focus on her warmth, her style, her smile. Come on. Why do women always have to be warm anyway? Was Lincoln warm? Was Eisenhower? It’s just another double standard. The...

Capital is intersectional says guest Zillah Eisenstein on The Laura Flanders Show this week. People with bodies labor, which means that the capital they produce is immersed in race and gender. Just like the bodies that make it, wealth’s not colorless or gender free. Anyone who pretends otherwise just isn’t serious about reducing inequality. With gender equality more of a priority than ever, women...

The market is magic, say capitalism's admirers but some that magic is pretty dark. Just look at what it's done to art and the art market. What once inspired generosity now feeds off its exact opposite - inequality and there's no reason art buyers or sellers should ever want to turn it back. I thought about this reading Molly Crabapple's bold, passionate book, Drawing Blood. “Pens can't take on swo...

“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. Several years ago, activists in North America, Europe and Israel, began campaignin...

What got a person locked up – no matter what - in 1790? Piracy. Period. At the birth of the republic mandatory minimum sentences were a rare and targeted thing. Attacking and robbing ships at sea got you life, no ifs, ands or buts. What gets you a mandatory minimum sentence today? Any one of 261 different crimes. Princeton professor Naomi Murakawa took a look, for her book, The First Civil Right,...

Black workers centers are meeting nationally this month to deepen their ties and strengthen their political power. In a sane world their agenda would be our national agenda: to build assets and access to resources, for the least wealthy Americans. After all, how strong do we want 21st Century America to be? By 2040, we’ll be a majority-minority nation, meaning the majority of us will be living fir...

The heads of 19th century African states, when they found their authority bypassed by colonial traders and their land and people savaged by powers beyond their control, sought to reassert their authority by erecting scary little statues with the community's rules literally nailed into their chest. "Thou shalt not kill", "thou shalt not steal". Every pledge made by the Kongo people was marked by a...

During his historic address to Congress, Pope Francis called out Dorothy Day. Scurrying to figure out why, reporters duly described Day as the co- founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, which feeds and houses the urban poor. It may take her being canonized to fill in the whole picture. Day was also a pacifist, a radical journalist, a socialist, a single mom. Her life story would make for a good...

Just because it’s called the Freedom of Information Act, doesn’t mean the information is free. In fact, if you’re an activist or a journalist trying to investigate the police, chances are it’s going to cost you, as reporters discovered last year when they tried to obtain documents pertaining to the police killing in Ferguson of Michael Brown.   In their efforts to report the story, reporters were...

It’s amazing how money media cover activists when they die. When radical philosopher and organizer Grace Lee Boggs passed away on October 5, she received long, respectful obituaries in just about every paper. "Activist and revolutionary", "trail blazer", "human rights advocate". Boggs, it was noted, lived to 100 years old. But it shouldn’t take a century for the media to notice Bogg’s ilk - the ac...

Mohammed el Gharani was one of the youngest detainees ever held at Guantanamo Bay. At the age of fourteen he was abducted, imprisoned and subjected to torture – a non person in America’s non prison camp. Close to eight years later, never having been charged or tried, he was released. But like all men who’ve been locked up in Guantanamo, Mohammed el Gharani is barred for life from ever entering the...

Towards the end of the new movie, This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein, author of the book that inspired the film, notices something about who’s leading the charge for change. They come from sacrifice zones, the very same places the powers that be have written off for environmental or ecological devastation. There’s another thing about those leaders too. From Beijing to Montana to the Alberta Tar...

The State of California recently conceded that its policy of keeping prisoners in isolation demanded an overhaul. Now can we overhaul our system of isolating prisons? As the prison activists and lawyers who forced California to change made clear, human beings are social animals. Isolation breaks spirits and souls and minds. So too, isolating our prisons from the centers of our body politic, breaks...

What do Gaza and Ferguson have in common? Security forces that stink. I mean it literally. Thanks to Missouri’s open records law, it has been confirmed that the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department is one of a slew of US city police forces to add a new Israeli crowd control spray to their arsenal. The spray, called skunk, is a vile smelling liquid that an Israeli company called Odortec has dev...

If the Guatemalans can send their war criminals to jail, why are ours still walking around? It just so happened I was reading Greg Grandin’s new biography of Henry Kissinger while the news was breaking in Guatemala. After thirty years of civil war, and many years since in which killers have transitioned seamlessly from being murderers to making money – and staying in power. Guatemalans said no mor...

BP‘s settlement for the Deepwater Horizon spill was great headline-grabbing news recently. Five Gulf coast governors as well as the US Attorney General took the opportunity to claim glory for the largest settlement with a single entity in American history. But who’s in deep water for the Deepwater? Beneath the headlines, it looks as if we are. In case you missed it, under terms announced July 2, B...

Waterfront sunsets, oysters, cool breezes on white sails. I hope the Bushes and the Cheneys enjoyed their long vacation, because now it is time for them to hand over their vacation homes to refugees. I know, you didn’t think your war would touch your mansions, but as Donald Rumsfeld once said, “Stuff happens.” This particular stuff is your fault. Plenty of people knew the invasion and occupation o...

Hi I’m Laura Flanders of GRITtv, for the Progressive Voices channel on Tune-In A year from now we’ll be in the election’s grimmest days; those weeks before the voting when every scrap of dirt that can be hurled at the candidates will have been unearthed, souped up and chucked, and whatever can’t be unearthed will have simply been made up. According to today’s estimates, campaigns are set to spend...