The F Word with Laura Flanders

The state of California agreed in early September to overhaul it's solitary confinement system. With some 3,000 living and breathing people locked up, some of them for twenty or thirty years, in small cells without windows, all but two hours a day — you can bet the system needs overhauling. It actually needs abolishing. As does our mass incarceration system more generally. I know, talk of prison a...

There’s US law and then there’s global trade law and if you ever felt inclined to believe that Congress rules the roost, just take a look at the Obama administration's evaporated pledge to take on corporate tax evaders. Obama’s talked for years about shutting down tax havens that let companies re-register overseas in order to avoid paying US taxes. He signed laws and hired new officers. He’s also...

It’s New Orleans remembrance time; that time where, for the last ten years at the end of August, public attention returns for a bit to the city that abandoned its poorest. Poor people clinging to rooftops in the richest nation on earth. The pictures shocked the world and broke our hearts. Mostly black, in a majority black city, democracy failed as spectacularly as the public safety system. Not onl...

You can now “unsend” email. Whoop di doop. Forgive me if my enthusiasm is under control. For one thing, “unsend’s” been around for years. Google’s announcement this June was merely that what had been experimental, will now be a built in feature for everybody. Once activated, “unsend” will give Gmail users between 5 and 30 seconds to click "undo send" after firing off an email. The news was sold as...

Almost a year after the 2012 election, Florida congressman Alan Grayson decided to hold a hearing. The number of drone attacks were going up not down; sparse news reports from mostly military sources weren’t making much of an impact on the American public. In October 2013, Grayson decided to invite a Pakistani family who'd experienced an attack themselves, to Capitol Hill to address congress direc...

Not so long ago, Yale university received a $150 million gift. That looked like a lot until Harvard scooped up $400 million a few weeks later. Both gifts came from Wall Street speculators – Blackstone Group Founder and CEO Stephen Schwarzman and hedge fund executive John S Paulson. Paulson’s donation alone was more money than 98 percent of US colleges have in their endowments, critics pointed out....

The nuclear clock’s still ticking and arms-trading is fuelling a suicidal race. There are a lot of things to fear in the world today. I’d like to suggest that African American women be taken off that list. Not long ago, I had a chance to hear from relatives of Black women killed at the hands of police. In more than half of the cases, those who ended up dying, were in need of help not violence. And...

“You rape our women and you’re taking over our country,” Dylann Roof is reported to have said as he opened fire on African Americans in Charleston, killing nine. His claim to act in women’s – which is to say white women’s – defense is as old as white male supremacy itself, and it’s been refuted for just as long. Ida B Wells Barnett was the first, debunking lies like Roof’s. Over a century ago, she...

It’s hard to imagine an American poet more celebrated than four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost whose most famous poem concludes: “Two roads diverged in a wood and I —I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” When the most celebrated poet’s most well-known lines praise difference why is it that we’re scared of it? Maybe we need more poets. That’s what John F K...

Sticks and stones may not break your bones, but stereotypes can certainly put your life in danger. That’s the message of a new report on police violence against women of color. Not only are black women, just like black men, in interactions with the police often alleged to be armed and dangerous when they’re not, but even when they are experiencing a mental health crisis, black women are seen as so...

It’s an old adage but it’s true, especially when it comes to policing: an injury to one really is an injury to all. That’s because like a bad movie, bad police tactics spread the globe. Accountability can go global too, but as in a recent case out of Ireland, justice moves more slowly. Shortly after the death of Baltimore’s Freddie Gray, a leaked police document claimed that a prisoner transported...

US media coverage of the Middle East is awash in vagueness – I’m looking at two headlines this year, “Palestinian Said to Be Killed by Israeli Soldiers” and “Palestinian Driver Suspected of Deliberately Hitting Jerusalem Bus Stop.” On top of the vagueness, there’s the imbalance. As the US Campaign to End the Occupation reported this April, a single rocket from Gaza into Israel this year, outweighe...

Indictments are nice, but institutional change is necessary. That’s the message bellowing out of Baltimore. Even as she announced charges against six officers in the death of Freddie Gray, State Attorney Marilyn Mosby called for “structural and system changes.” Why focus on the structural when there’s a homicide to prosecute? Here’s a case in point. It doesn’t get more structural than bricks and m...

It’s becoming popular in the media to talk about the missing millions-- the 1.5 million African American men in their prime who are missing from civic life. Those millions, it’s explained, are mostly missing because they’ve died young or been locked up. There’s been a catastrophic rise of incarceration in the US over the past four decades. But missing from the missing men stories are the women who...

LED signs, banner drops, projections on famous monuments; activists have used all manner of tactics to spread the word about the Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP. Still, a vote on the largest trade pact of our time is looming before most voters have even heard of it. Media coverage might have helped, but in the eighteen months leading up to January 1 this year, network news: ABC, CBS, and NBC made...

Hi I’m Laura Flanders of GRITtv. A new book just out on the Gilded Age, calls ours an Age of Acquiescence. We’ve become a nation of accepters, its author argues, wiling to tolerate corporate crime and public poverty as inevitable outcomes of a system that’s just rigged. The current public debate, author Steven Frazer suggests, reflects a resignation that market capitalism is bedrock, unchangeable....

“The cost of doing business.” That’s what corporations call it when they claim a deduction from their taxes for the damage they’ve done to people and the planet. It’s a cost of doing business all right; a cost to us, of doing business with them the way we currently do it, and it’s just one of the reasons so many people are calling for a whole new system. To recap: on April 20, 2010, BP’s leased De...

Hi I’m Laura Flanders of GRITtv. Governor Scott Walker stirred up the hornets this winter when he not only proposed cutting $300 million from the University of Wisconsin's budget, but simultaneously tried to change the vaunted mission of that institution from seeking truth and serving society to “meeting the needs of the workforce.” Walker’s effort to edit UW’s Progressive Era principles angered e...

Women’s History Month is drawing to a close and as if on cue, we saw another example of why paying attention to gender matters, and how for the most part we still don’t do it. In their blistering review of the Ferguson Police Department, Justice Department investigators reported that racism was pervasive, along with a longstanding practice of ignoring allegations of racial discrimination and abuse...

Communism, capitalism; I just spent a week in Hungary, where anyone in their 50s has spent more or less equal parts of their life under each system and what many of those people find surprising now is just how little has changed. As one resident of Budapest, exclaimed with a sigh: “Twenty five years after the transition, the one thing we didn’t expect was for so much to be the same.” It’s a cautio...

Hi I’m Laura Flanders of GRITtv. Conservatives need to figure out where they stand on local power. Their views present a paradox, suggested The New York Times recently. Causing the confusion are so-called pre-emption laws passed by states to stop local governments from enacting their own policies. Eight states have passed laws scuttling local sick days rules. More have sought to pre-empt local reg...

Hi I’m Laura Flanders of GRITtv, for the Progressive Voices channel on Tune-In Hillary Clinton effectively entered the 2016 presidential race this week with a major speech to a women’s conference in Silicon Valley. Word is, she’s decided to make gender even more central to her campaign this time around. In California she did just that; she also exposed the incredible whiteness of her feminism, whi...

Hi I’m Laura Flanders of GRITtv, for the Progressive Voices channel on Tune-In The global newswire Associated Press announced this January that it will no longer refer to the app-based cab-hail service Uber, as “ride-sharing.” The move follows criticism that services like Uber and Lyft are very far from sharing; they are taking more than they’re giving. That’s certainly the view of Bhairavi Desai...

You cannot be what you cannot see, they say. We all saw an economy in crisis a few years ago. Now, in between fear of another crash and pain in a supposed recovery, many Americans are frustrated. Last year, researchers with the Pew Center found that 78 percent of Americans believe that too much power is concentrated in a few huge companies. Sixty two percent believe our current economic system is...

Hi I’m Laura Flanders of GRITtv. When it comes to elections, there’s the “who” of politics and then there’s the “what” of it, by which I mean what do parties and politicians actually do to win support? While they’re not brilliant at covering the first, the money media in the US tend to be truly terrible at even considering the latter. The historic election in Greece is a case in point. Read the US...