Laura Flanders

Tony Kushner Denied Honors Over Palestine

Laura Flanders on May 5, 2011 - 5:45 PM ET

This week, the news hit that Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, perhaps best known for his Angels in America, was being blocked from receiving an honorary degree from the City University of New York because of his views on Israel.

Kushner, who also has an honorary degree from Brandeis University, told Salon's Justin Elliott that this was an “unprecedented and pretty ugly experience.

Sadly, though, it's not that rare for academia to balk at support for Palestinians. Elliott notes that just this January, a Brooklyn College adjunct professor was fired—and later reinstated—after students and an assemblyman complained about his views. Last summer, GRITtv guest and fellow Brooklyn College professor Moustafa Bayoumi was the center of a controversy around his book, How Does it Feel to Be A Problem? Being Young and Arab in America. And back in 2009, Joel Kovel visited us at GRITtv to discuss his termination from Bard College, which he believed was over his pro-Palestinian views.

It's notable that the same cast of characters turns up again and again in these stories. Bruce Kesler, a Brooklyn College alum, caused a stir in both Brooklyn College cases, and Jeffrey Wiesenfeld is the CUNY board member who blocked Kushner's honor.

Wiesenfeld is, Elliott notes, a trustee at the pro-Israel think tank the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and an organizer of the Salute to Israel Day Parade Committee. His views are clearly not considered controversial or problematic.

Instead, even a famed Jewish playwright like Kushner, who reiterated in his letter to the CUNY trustees that he supports the continued existence of Israel even as he opposes the state's policies, is accused of being an extremist.

At a time when dancing in the streets is accepted as a proper response to the killing of Osama bin Laden, it's ironic to see that support for human rights—in this case in Palestine—is still controversial.

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The F Word: Is BP Too Big To Fail?

Laura Flanders on May 3, 2011 - 5:35 PM ET

Now to the opposite of cuts. Over a year after the biggest oil spill in US history and even as criminal investigations continue, BP is still receiving millions of dollars in government contracts.

That's according to a new story by Jason Leopold at Truthout, who notes that only last week Air BP, a division of the oil company responsible for the oil spill causing problems in the Gulf of Mexico, was awarded a $42 million contract to supply fuel to Dover Air Force Base.

While Leopold was unable to confirm that that fuel was going to supply planes headed to Libya, what he did find was that the contract was given under “unusual and compelling urgency,” which means that the government found the need so important that they limited the bids.

So BP's not only still getting government largesse; it's getting preferential treatment—even as other government investigators look into its negligence?

Leopold also reports that twice last year the company violated its probation and faced no serious consequences. Unlike a person, when a corporation violates its probation you can't just throw it in jail.

All told, BP got fifty-two government contracts worth $56.5 million for fiscal year 2011 while we got oil spills, dead fisheries and $4-a-gallon gas.

Officials have noted that it's not so easy to debar BP from government contracts while it provides some 80 percent of Defense Department fuel.

So as it was with banks, so it is with BP—Scott Amey of the Project on Government Oversight told Leopold that BP “is a perfect example of a contractor too big to fail."

US Uncut are reminding us that it's not too late to learn the lesson—some power's too big to be safe for our democracy. Say US Uncut about the banks—we'd better break them up before they default again. Perhaps we need to add huge contractors to the list that should be shrunk before they hold us all for ransom.

The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv and editor of At The Tea Party, out now from OR Books. GRITtv broadcasts weekdays on DISH Network and DIRECTv, on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter and "like" us on Facebook.

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Searching for Closure at Ground Zero

Laura Flanders on May 2, 2011 - 6:14 PM ET

Closure. That was the word on people’s lips last night after President Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed in a firefight with US forces in Pakistan.

Hours after the attack on the Trade Towers in 2001 I walked down to the site. I returned there again last night and found a loud crowd shouting mostly the words “USA, USA,” in the darkness to a clutch of news cameras.

While different in almost every other respect, what I found on both occasions were people searching. A decade ago, dust still on their skin, people were looking for safety, for loved ones, for explanation. This time, with a whole lot more breath in their lungs, people were looking once again—for others to be with and for closure.

“I came because they came,” one firefighter told me, pointing at the crowd. He spent days at the site a decade ago looking and ultimately finding the body of a co-worker. Like everyone else who took time to talk, he said that he hoped the killing of bin Laden would bring comfort, and closure to the victims of the attacks—and to America’s critics.

People want this chapter closed. The longing for that is palpable. Others last night talked about bringing troops back home, putting America back on course and moving towards peace. Quite a few people talked about that.

Much as we may want, history doesn’t tend to roll out in neat chapters. “Justice has been done,” the President said Sunday night. It’s an indication of how changed we are: no arrest, no trial.

Justice isn’t, actually, a forty-minute firefight. bin Laden hasn’t been the leader of Al Qaeda in any operational way for years. Is his killing an achievement for US intelligence, armed forces and the president? Absolutely. Will his death end history? No more than the attacks of began it.

To me, where we are today feels like where we were were on 9/11 itself. Americans seeking sense and getting vengeance. Seeking connection and finding mostly media-fed jingoism. Trillions of dollars and a global ocean of tears later, Americans want to move on.

It’s not that simple. Just as it was ten years ago, and as it has been shown to be around the world since, remapping our way as a nation will not, in all likelihood, be done by our leaders. It’ll have to be done by us. By we the people.

The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv and editor of At The Tea Party, out now from OR Books. GRITtv broadcasts weekdays on DISH Network and DIRECTv, on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter and “like” us on Facebook.

For links to The Nation’s complete coverage of Osama bin Laden’s death, click here.

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Ad Policy

Let's Admit the Truth About American Royals

Laura Flanders on April 27, 2011 - 5:25 PM ET

According to polls, only about 6 percent of Americans are following with any close attention the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. But that’s not stopping the media fascination on both sides of the Atlantic with American’s supposed fascination with Britain’s royals.

“Royal wedding reminds us why we tossed Brits,” ran one letter to a local paper recently. That exorbitant $80 million spent on a medieval style ritual in time of twenty-first-century austerity. It’s shameful. It’s Old World. It’s just what Americans fought a revolutionary war to throw off.

And then there are the folks like Rupert Cornwall at the UK Independent who argue that people in the US love British royals precisely because they don’t have their own real thing. Gary Younge at The Nation noted that even his liberal friends wanted to know what he, a British citizen, thought of the prince marrying a “commoner.” Please.

The only serious and in fact actually quite insidious part about this is that it reinscribes the notion that the US has no class.

Really? When the top one percent of wealthiest Americans own 34 percent of the country’s wealth and enjoyed 80 percent of the total increase in wealth here between 1980 and 2005? No class?

As for ruling class? In the UK the commoners keep state royals on welfare. Here we do the same with our corporations. Billions in tax dollars keep them afloat and keep CEOs in mansions. Why not just give them palaces? At least we could keep them open for tours.

Since the Supreme Court has given corporations free speech rights and personhood—how about marriage equality next?

Then, we could string up Bunting flags for the next monopolisitic coupling… At the Comcast and NBC nuptials we’d all throw money while they stroll down the aisle. And—with a nod to Jim Hightower—instead of aristocrats in coats of arms, the paid-off politicians would wear their logos on their lapels. At least then we’d know who owns whom.

The trinkets from a corporate marrriage might be dreary. And the offspring, who can say? But at least we’d get a day off and one hell of a party. Plus we’d move out of denial. The more I think about it the more I like it. Monarchies or Megacorps? Why not declare them royal?

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Oil Prices: Gouge Us Baby One More Time

Laura Flanders on April 26, 2011 - 4:51 PM ET

Gas prices have been edging up since February, reaching $4 a gallon this Easter, and Republicans are gearing up to make a stink about it.

To blame Democrats, that is, for setting things up this way. Blaming green energy initiatives for driving up prices, House Republicans are planning to hold hearings on a slurry of bills aimed at expanding domestic oil production in response to high gasoline prices. Even the president admits gas prices effect his standing in the polls.

But it should be easy enough to fight back. While the five biggest oil companies report historically high profit earnings, the same GOP that would slash juice programs for poor kids in school stands firm for federal subsidies for big oil.

It's enough to make your head spin. But then again, so is this country's entire relationship with Big Oil. Like a marriage from hell. Americans keep getting beaten up environmentally, politically and at the pump. And even as we're beaten up, we shell out: in subsidies, tax breaks, and troops sent around the world to die and kill in defense of the interests of Big Oil.

While Americans keep paying; Big Oil keeps on profiting. The top five companies together made a greasy trillion dollars profit over the last decade. That's Trillion with a T. Yet Republican budgets would lay off the regulators even as they lay on the corporate welfare. House Republicans marked the anniversary of the BP oil spill by voting unanimously FOR extending oil subsidies again this year.

It'll come as no surprise that for its first round of political contributions for the 2012 cycle, BP handed out a total $29,000 and it went almost entirely to House Republican leaders. The president’s response so far has been to initiate a task force to investigate illegal commodities trading. But as Public Citizen reports, it's not the illegal but the legal speculation that's most to blame.

And progressive Democrats offer the president a far stronger way to go. Tax dirty energy companies, end corporate welfare, and impose a tax on commodities trading. Instead of getting on the defensive and easing up on drilling, the White House should ask Senator Bernie Sanders about his end-to-subsidies bill.

The president needs to take a moral stand against Big Oil for all our sakes, before Drill Baby Drill becomes Gouge Us Baby One More Time.

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Guantánamo Files Show Media Priorities

Laura Flanders on April 25, 2011 - 5:47 PM ET

As I perused the latest WikiLeaks releases this morning, a retweet from their Twitter feed caught my eye:

“Gitmo: Compare the first paragraph of these two stories about the same thing.” One was a link to the BBC and one was CNN.

At the BBC, the title is “Wikileaks: Many at Guantanamo ‘Not dangerous’ ” and the first graf points out that the US believed many were innocent or only low-level operatives.

CNN’s piece, by contrast, says that the released documents “reveal extraordinary details about the alleged terrorist activities of Al Qaeda operatives” at Gitmo.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post starts off with an ominous September 11 reference, and goes on to intimately describe Al Qaeda higher-ups planning for a long war from one city in Pakistan.

A blogger at Balloon Juice also noted the unwillingness of US media outlets to call torture “torture.” McClatchy, they note, uses the T-word, as well as the UK Guardian, but the New York Times, one recipient of the actual leaks, and NPR both use the cop-out term “harsh interrogation techniques” instead.

Why does this matter, when WikiLeaks makes the info available to all? Remember that WikiLeaks simply posts the data, in this case nearly 800 assessments of Gitmo detainees, and media outlets are free to interpret. Because most people don’t have time to read 800 dossiers, they will read an article or listen to a broadcast and form their opinion of the story that way.

So the takeaway in the United States will remain “dangerous terrorists!” and Guantánamo will most likely remain open three years after the president vowed to close it, while overseas the rest of the world will continue to wonder why the country that claims to love freedom so much is continuing to imprison and torture innocent people.

The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv and editor of At The Tea Party, out now from OR Books. GRITtv broadcasts weekdays on DISH Network and DIRECTv, on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter and "like" us on Facebook.

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US Lack of Investment Is Destabilizing the World

Laura Flanders on April 20, 2011 - 4:24 PM ET

Here in the United States all we seem to hear about is deficits and debt. Yet even the countries that hold a lot of our debt are concerned for our lack of investment at home.

China’s pension fund head recently said that the US government needs to reduce not just its fiscal deficit but its trade gap, in order to maintain the dollar’s stability. US average levels need to be closer to those of developing nations and emerging markets, the manager of China’s Sovereign Wealth fund advised.

In other words, even China, which sends so many of its goods here, is worried about our imbalance between imports and exports. And there’s another problem. When the US rich used stimulus money and Federal Reserve help not to hire here but to seek to maximize profits by hiring abroad, and to gamble on commodity markets, that cash not only failed to boost the US economy as it was intended, it drove up commodity prices and the inflation risk in China and elsewhere.

And that, say the Chinese, is not only bad for most Americans but also destabilizes the global economy. Not exactly the message we’ve been hearing stateside.

The piece the Chinese remember but our media tend to ignore is that ours is a global world. Our so-called “jobless recovery” is no great news for anyone. Outsourcing, high unemployment and rock-bottom wages for those with jobs that can’t be outsourced leave even those with full-time work in no mood to spend on Chinese products or anyone else’s.

And less faith in the US economy and its currency abroad will likely make our national debt bigger, not smaller, as the value of Treasury bonds teeters downwards.

GRITtv guest Bob Herbert had it right when he wrote that the United States needs a better ruling class after this one “stopped being concerned with the health of society and became almost entirely obsessed with money.” The Chinese apparently agree. Now what can we do to get Washington to become a responsible partner for Beijing?

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Missed Connections from the Economic to the Social

Laura Flanders on April 19, 2011 - 5:00 PM ET

Is there a journalism school somewhere that teaches up-and-comers to put stories into little boxes?

Half our job in independent media, it seems to me, is putting the connections back.

Day to day, in your average news cycle, there are political stories, business reports, human interest, arts and leisure... and never do they meet.

Take today. In "politics," it's the presidential deficit tour, coming to a town near you. Will Obama voters support a plan to cut critical public services? That's question number one—and only.

In "economic" news there's new tax data showing that the tax rate for the wealthiest Americans has effectively been cut in half since the mid-1990s, while the combined annual income of the richest 400 Americans soared from $6 billion to $23 billion. Period. End of sentence.

Somewhere in an "in-brief" box, you'll probably find a note from Orange County, California where Marilyn Davenport, a member of the Republican Central Committee recently sent an email with Barack Obama's face superimposed on that of a chimp, with a crack about a birth certificate.

We like to keep our stories separate: the economic (dollars & cents) and the so-called social (bias and bigotry) and politics—where the people have a choice. But the latter was always about the first. Right now, as before in our history, it's not just that the economy's bad—it's also that change is coming, inevitably: economic, demographic, political, inter-personal. The status-quo of the wealth gap cannot hold. Democracy can't, actually, be privatized. And a non-white majority is upon us.

Limited choices, concentrated profits, spurts of racism: what's playing out now can be seen as a set of disconnected spasms. Or it can be reported as a reconstruction story. As the century turns, the fight is on over who gets what and who keeps what. You can see it every where you look.

Demonizing Taxes, Heightening Inequality

Laura Flanders on April 18, 2011 - 5:27 PM ET

Today is Tax Day in the US, and that's almost universally greeted with groans and complaints. That tax word's been so effectively demonized that it may be there's no coming back. Is it time for a new word?

Some research by Duke University's Dan Ariely suggests it might be.

Ariely's study showed that Americans actually want a more equitable society—in fact, they think they have one. When asked to identify their homeland from a list of nations described only by their level of equality—a majority of those polled picked Sweden, thinking it was the US. When asked to create their ideal society, Democrats, Republicans, men and women, the rich and the poor all created a distribution of wealth that is much more equal than the one we've got.

All that "social mobility, low inequality" stuff—Americans love it. They just don't have it. In fact, social mobility here's been shrivelling, as the wealth gap's been opening up.

There are only a few ways to get that more equal distribution: government investment (benefits and services) corporate action (paying people more) or redistribution: taking from each according to their means, to help the whole. We call that tax.

Yet according to Ariely, the very same people who expressed an ardent wish for an equal society have an highly averse reaction to the word tax. Why, he wondered, recently, to National Public Radio.

It's not so hard to figure out. Day in day out, when you hear taxes mentioned, what's the context? Social citizenship? Tools of an equal society? Or is it rather all about how heavy the burden is, how overtaxed Americans are. The Taxman, the IRS—the first public workers our media teach us to hate.

There are taxes to hate—taxes that go to give a blank check to the military, or tax credits for corporations that export American jobs. But the truth is, taxes on the rich have done nothing but fall since the Reagan years. And inequality's only gotten bigger.

What's the money media's stake in all this? It's hardly hidden. Remember that GE tax refund for $3.2 billion? The co-owner of NBC and MSNBC isn't alone either. Time Warner and News Corp, owners of CNN and Fox, are also on a list of the biggest corporate tax avoiders.

Today, when you hear that news story about how tax day is no fun, remember that you're actually paying more than the company behind the news. And remember who it was who taught you to hate taxes. And if you come up with a new word, let us know?

The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv and editor of At The Tea Party, out now from OR Books. GRITtv broadcasts weekdays on DISH Network and DIRECTv, on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter and 'like' us on Facebook.

Like this blog post? Read it on The Nation’s free iPhone App, NationNow.

Time for Obama to Join the Fight

Laura Flanders on April 14, 2011 - 4:29 PM ET

Obama’s punching below his weight class again. That was Gary Younge’s metaphor, a boxing analogy that makes more sense if you consider the weight a politician carries to be the support for their policies around the country.

Obama won office in the midst of economic meltdown, with applause lines about doing away with Bush tax cuts for the rich, about ending a destructive war, about universal healthcare.

This week he kicked off his re-election campaign with a speech about those same things—but three years in, he’s conceded the framing to the Republicans even when the majority of the country supports his original plan. Deficits, deficits, deficits—even as protests continue around the country in favor of jobs, jobs, jobs.

Meanwhile, Younge notes, Tea Party candidates without majority support are punching well above their weight class—they may be losing, but you certainly can’t accuse them of not trying. Maine governor Paul LePage was elected with just 38 percent of the vote, yet he’s picked a fight over a pro-labor mural that has drawn intervention from the Federal Department of Labor.

What can be done to show Obama that there’s plenty of fight left in the country if he’d only tap into it? A good speech—a solid defense of programs like Medicare—rings hollow when it’s come much too late and conceded too much ground. A line in the sand on tax cuts for the rich means little when it’s three years old and been proven false already.

Yet from Wisconsin to Ohio to New Jersey to Maine to right here in New York, citizens are fighting the austerity frame, calling for investment in jobs, for taxes for millionaires, for real health care. The fight goes on without Obama, when he should have led it.

Will he notice that in time for a re-election battle?