Laura Flanders

Reverend Jackson: 'We Must Not Just Settle for Zimmerman' (VIDEO)

Laura Flanders on April 11, 2012 - 11:55 PM ET

George Zimmerman was behind bars Wednesday night, forty-five days and countless rallies after he went free after shooting unarmed high school junior Trayvon Martin in a Sanford, Florida, gated community. Zimmerman now faces the possibility of life in prison, but the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who has led some of those rallies, says that the mobilizing shouldn't end.

"When Rosa Parks was arrested [for refusing to go to the back of the bus], if we had focused on the bus driver and not on the states’ rights law, we would have missed the point…. We must not just settle for Zimmerman, we must repeal the Stand Your Ground law."

No Regard To Race at Wells Fargo? (VIDEO)

Laura Flanders on April 11, 2012 - 11:25 AM ET

The National Fair Housing Alliance filed a complaint on April 10 with the US Department of Housing against San Francisco–based Wells Fargo, accusing the nation’s largest mortgage lender of failing to maintain and market foreclosed properties in black and Hispanic neighborhoods. The federal Fair Housing Act requires banks, investors, servicers and other parties to maintain and market homes without regard to race or ethnicity. Wells Fargo disputes the claim, saying in a statement that it conducts all lending practices in a fair and consistent manner without regard to race. The bank services one out of every six home loans in the United States.

But this is far from the first time that Wells Fargo has been accused of racism. Back in 2008, the city of Baltimore filed a federal suit, charging that Wells Fargo was unfairly targetting African-Americans for subprime loans. Several whistleblowers came forth, one of whom described a workplace in which blacks were referred as “mud people” and subprime lending as “ghetto loans.” Beth Jacobson, a former loan officer at Wells Fargo, came on GRITtv at the time to explain how she’d been encouraged to push customers who could have qualified for prime loans into subprime mortgages.

No regard to race at Wells Fargo? You tell me.

Worker Ownership For the 21st Century?

Laura Flanders on March 27, 2012 - 8:03 AM ET

It may not be the revolution’s dawn, but it’s certainly a glint in the darkness. On Monday, this country’s largest industrial labor union teamed up with the world’s largest worker-cooperative to present a plan that would put people to work in labor-driven enterprises that build worker power and communities, too.

Titled “Sustainable Jobs, Sustainable Communities: The Union Co-op Model,” the organizational proposal released at a press conference on March 26 in Pittsburgh, draws on the fifty-five year experience of the Basque-based Mondragon worker cooperatives. To quote the document:

“In contrast to a Machiavellian economic system in which the ends justify any means, the union co-op model embraces the idea that both the ends and means are equally important, meaning that treating workers well and with dignity and sustaining communities are just as important as business growth and profitability.”

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An Economy We Want to Occupy

Laura Flanders on March 21, 2012 - 10:47 AM ET

Plans are afoot for a grand reawakening at Occupy Wall Street and with that comes a return to the main project. While confrontations with police have grabbed the media’s eye (there was another big police bust-up this weekend), for many, the encampments have always been as much about possibility as they are about protest.

In that spirit, and in the sprit of the conversation begun here last month about a possible worker co-op at the old Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago, I’m posting the transcript of an interview I conducted last November with members of what was then a loosely defined group at Occupy Wall St who were studying “solidarity economics.”

In part two of this interview, you’ll hear from Mike Johnson of Solidarity NYC, who’s been deeply involved in cooperative live and work projects in the city since the 1970s. Part one features Jen Abrams and Caroline Woolard, co-founders of OurGoods.org, in a conversation about value, markets and surviving the money economy.

Jeffrey Sachs: Population Controller? (VIDEO)

Laura Flanders on March 16, 2012 - 4:20 PM ET

In a March 1 op-ed in the Washington Post Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs made his pitch to be the next president of the World Bank promising to “lead the bank into a new era of problem-solving.” John Cavanaugh and Robin Broad have laid out a raft of righteous concerns about Sachs’s candidacy. The “solutions” Sachs proposes to poverty, they point out, can be summed up in the not very-new words: “aid” and “trade.” As if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s Sachs’s other favorite problem solver: population control. That’s taking us to a new era, alright: right back to the nineteenth century of Thomas Malthus.

Sachs presented five Reith lectures titled “Bursting at the Seams” in 2007 in which he hit on several of his proposed solutions, among them trade, aid, new technologies and "stabilizing population." “The evidence is overwhelming that it's possible and necessary to have a rapid demographic transition on a voluntary basis to greatly reduce fertility rates in poor countries." He reiterated that point more forcefully in an op-ed for CNN last October. “How can we enjoy sustainable development on a very crowded planet?” He asked.

Remembering Lucy Gonzales Parsons This International Women's Day

Laura Flanders on March 8, 2012 - 9:56 AM ET

"Workers shouldn’t 'strike and go out and starve, but strike and remain in and take possession of the necessary property of production.'” So believed Lucy Gonzales Parsons, who died seventy years ago this week. In light of all the meanings the word “occupy” has come to gather in these times, William Loren Katz’s essay about Parsons seems particularly relevant. I post his essay here for International Working Women’s Day, with thanks.

Lucy Gonzales Parsons