Laura Flanders

Labor Day Message: We Can't Labor Without Our Lives

Laura Flanders on September 3, 2012 - 10:04 AM ET

“Every culture lives within its dream,” wrote Lewis Mumford in 1934:

“It is reality – while the sleep lasts. But, like the sleeper, a culture lives within an objective world that…sometimes breaks into the dream, like a noise, to modify it or to make further sleep impossible.”

The Bushwomen. They're Back.

Laura Flanders on August 30, 2012 - 7:13 PM ET

There she is, just the woman I was thinking of, on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Except she isn’t apologizing for her role unleashing the GOP’s “war on women.” She is writing about terrorism and the Clean Air Act. What I’d wanted someone to ask Christine Todd Whitman about was the day at the 1996 RNC, when she helped coronate today’s extremist GOP.

Former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman is usually described in the money media with the words “moderate” and “pro-choice” glued firmly to her name. Republican in a pro-choice state, she’s on the record saying that abortion is “a personal decision between a woman and her doctor,” and the government has no business telling a woman what to do. (That used to be the conservative position.) She’s held up by pro-choicers as a tragicomic victim, abandoned by her party, but the fact is, Whitman’s done more to help the vicious wing of the GOP than she ever did to stop the backlash.

To go back to the RNC. By 1996, Christine Todd Whitman had already long been loyal to her rightward-lurching party. Moderate voters were infuriated by the 104th Congress and Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. At Gingrich’s bidding, Whitman agreed to rebut president Bill Clinton’s State of the Union address in 1995 and in ’96. She loaned her party her reputation and her media-friendly face when they had very unfriendly policies in store for the nation.

Romney's Unabashed Lies Are Political Gold, So Why Stop?

Laura Flanders on August 24, 2012 - 3:13 PM ET

The sixteenth anniversary of TANF hit this week, and the Republican presidential candidate spent his time lying about the president’s position on it. The president, Mitt Romney insists, stripped the work requirements out of the temporary assistance program that replaced welfare for poor families under Bill Clinton in 1996.

Although every fact-check has shown he’s wrong, Romney and the Romney-phile propaganda groups keep pounding away at their message with ads like this one:

Unidentified male: “Under Obama’s plan you wouldn’t have to work and you wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check.”

Ad Policy

'Poem about My Rights': Todd Akin, Meet June Jordan

Laura Flanders on August 22, 2012 - 7:08 PM ET

Todd Akin, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and now Laurie Penny’s latest post (“What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape”), all have me thinking about June Jordan’s great “Poem about My Rights.” So here it is.

Poem about My Rights

Bill Moyers: For Campaign Cash, TV Gives Back Nothing

Laura Flanders on August 14, 2012 - 10:28 AM ET

I had the opportunity to interview author and broadcaster Bill Moyers last year, just before his latest TV show launched. Then, we were a full year ahead of the presidential election. Now, as we head into the cable-news crush called convention season, I watched our conversation again. It’s even more pointed now. Says Moyers: “The scandal, one part of the scandal, is local television stations make enormous sums of money from all of the campaigning that goes on every two or fours years…and they give back nothing for that.… Nothing. They should be giving “free time” to the candidates that have real debate with citizens and answer questions. Instead, they write carefully manufactured commercials that are exploitive and misleading and demeaning.”

Read Moyers, and then read this speech from Newton Minow, then chair of the Federal Communication Commission. Minnow said it best, when he said it 1961: “In a time of peril and opportunity, the old complacent, unbalanced fare of action-adventure and situation comedies is simply not good enough.”

Today, cable news has turned our elections themselves into unbalanced action adventures or worse, situation comedies. And public television, barring shows like Moyers’s own, is barely keeping afloat—or keeping anyone awake. Given our situation as a nation, maybe the last word should be “tragedies.”

Racial Profiling on Trial in Arizona (Video)

Laura Flanders on August 6, 2012 - 8:23 PM ET

Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio is facing a class action suit that accuses him of racism in law enforcement. Omar Jadwat is a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, one of the groups representing the plaintiffs. Last week, Jadwat explained what’s at stake in the Arpaio case and what difference the Arizona suit might make. But is the Maricopa County sheriff the only problem where discrimination by law enforcement is concerned? Far from it. Another nasty piece of the immigration picture is the federal law that permits officers like Arpaio to serve as immigration agents in the first place. Unfortunately, as Jadwat says, “the federal government is not going to sue itself.” Indeed. Watch. The transcript of our entire conversation is below:

Laura Flanders: There are a variety of plaintiffs in this suit. Tell me a story. What has one of them gone through?

We Can Curb Financial Speculation [VIDEO]

Laura Flanders on August 3, 2012 - 10:27 AM ET

“You’d think there is somebody watching the control panel somewhere.” There is not. That’s what the head of one market research firm told the New York Times after a swarm of computerized trades caused craziness on Wall Street Wednesday.

Says Larry Tabb of the Tabb Group, “We still don’t have a firm grasp over our market infrastructure.”

Full Employment is Possible! Robert Pollin (VIDEO)

Laura Flanders on July 30, 2012 - 5:21 PM ET

Prominent economists have been expounding for months on the dire consequences of this country’s unemployment crisis. As recently as this May, Dean Baker and Ken Hassett exhorted us to pay vigilant attention. In an op-ed headlined “The Human Disaster,” they described unemployment as “nothing short of a national emergency.”

Still, the election discussion plods on with barely a nod to the criminal unemployment disaster.