Lauraflanders Videos

Unemployment is up, Wall Street is reporting record profits, the health care debate is dragging on, and Americans are angry. There's no doubt about the anger, anyway. But it hasn't translated thus far into any increased agitation for labor. Workers are getting squeezed from all sides--more work, less pay, the constant fear of job loss, and employers using the specter of that job loss as a bulwark against complaints. "You're lucky to have a job," indeed. What happened to organized labor in the US? With the decline of manufacturing jobs and rise of female-dominated service fields, does the old labor union model still hold up, or do we need new ways of organizing and supporting workers? And what happened to solidarity? Paula Finn, Editor of the New Labor Forum, Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas? and The Wrecking Crew and Wall Street Journal columnist, Tom Geoghegan, labor lawyer, recent Congressional candidate, and author of Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back joined Laura to talk about labor's problems and suggest some solutions to help all of us, whether we're union members or not.

No sooner had they voted to move the health debate forward, than Senators. Joe Lieberman, I/D-Conn., and Ben Nelson, D-Neb., threatened to stop it in its tracks. Both "indicated Sunday that they will not vote to pass the package if it includes a government-run insurance program," no matter what the people in their states actually want, no matter what positive difference it might make. Lieberman's state of Connecticut is overwhelmingly for a public option--68% overall, including 83% of Democrats and 73% of independents. He's against it. No matter what. Private insurers are Ben Nelson's biggest donors. Nelson's been against a public option from the start -- back in May he said it was because the public plan 'would be too attractive and would hurt the private insurance plans.? Yet 46% of the Nebraska Democrats asked in a new poll would be less likely to support Nelson in a primary if he filibusters health care. At least in the House, so called Blue Dog Democrats claimed their opposition was based on some semblance of political calculus. Big city liberals just don't understand what it's like "out there" in tenuously democratic Blue Dog districts with a mid term looming -- the argument, mostly unchallenged, led to concessions after concession by House leadership. Even that conventional calculus deserves a second look. Are all those Blue Dog seats really in so much danger? Michael Tomasky, writing in the New York Review of Books, said it's not necessarily true that the Blue Dogs are ham-strung by their districts. "All but a small number of these Democrats won their own races by a greater margin than McCain's over Obama in the district. Thirty of them beat their GOP opponents by 10 percentage points more than McCain beat Obama." Moreover, as Tomasky continues, "for the vast majority of members of Congress, once you've been elected and reelected once or twice, it takes either a pretty big scandal or a rare historical tidal wave (as in 1994) to produce defeat." The Blue Dogs' opposition to the public option never did make much sense. If their biggest concern is cost: there's no more effective cost-container on the table than a robust public option. And the Blue Dogs' districts tend to be poorer?where people could benefit from a public option the most. So what's playign out here? It's not substantive; it's not even political in voting-booth sense. What's playing out is pocket book politics - the legislator's pocket book. Lieberman's received over $4 million from health related business and private insurance companies over his career. It's not people politics, it's campaign contribution politics that are playing out in the Senate. The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter.com.

Green jobs have been touted over and over as the solution to the crisis in manufacturing in the US, able to solve climate problems and employment issues at the same time. But they won't be any kind of solution at all if they aren't available to those who need them the most. The Applied Research Center has put together a toolkit for ensuring that federal funds for green jobs are used to create well-paid, union-represented jobs that are available to women and people of color and that help to rebuild communities that have been hardest hit by the economic collapse.

Matthew Hoh was the first US civilian official to resign in protest over the conduct of the war in Afghanistan. The Washington Post called him "exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid the administration was looking for to help expand its development efforts." In this video from Brave New Films, Hoh reads his letter of resignation and explains why he decided to make a public statement. "The people that are fighting us there are fighting because they're occupied," he says of Afghanistan.

"Next year 'looks like an unavoidable bloodbath for a multitude of "zombie" borrowers, investors and lenders' and the shakeout could continue for 'several years,' says a recent report by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the Urban Land Institute drawn from confidential interviews with industry experts." The Huffington Post Investigative Fund isn't talking about a new horror movie here, but a new problem that threatens to destabilize hundreds of small- and medium-sized banks across the country. We haven't heard much about "zombie" banks lately, but the range of "zombie" buildings, built with easy credit at the height of the real estate bubble but now standing empty, presents a new threat that might not be as gory as brain-eating monsters, but could be just as devastating.

During the Great Depression, the labor movement was a major player pushing a progressive agenda and helping to put people back to work. While we've heard plenty of comparisons between the current recession and the Depression, we haven't seen a return of the kind of militancy that came from labor in the 20s and 30s. With all the anger swirling around right now, where's the organizing?Paula Finn, Editor of the New Labor Forum, Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas? and The Wrecking Crew and Wall Street Journal columnist, Tom Geoghegan, labor lawyer, recent Congressional candidate, and author of Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back joined Laura to talk about labor's problems and suggest some solutions to help all of us, whether we're union members or not.While labor issues are lately ignored by both parties--Democrats paying lip service and Republicans using populist anger to push through tax cuts for big business--most people can agree that we don't want to be ingesting dangerous chemicals. Yet many plastics used to package food contain Bisphenol A, a synthetic estrogen with harmful effects on the endocrine system.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote of the dangers of Bisphenol A, a common chemical in plastics and can liners: While the evidence isn?t conclusive, it justifies precautions. In my family, we?re cutting down on the use of those plastic containers that contain BPA to store or microwave food, and I?m drinking water out of a metal bottle now. In my reporting around the world, I?ve come to terms with the threats from warlords, bandits and tarantulas. But endocrine disrupting chemicals ? they give me the willies. Kristof isn't the only one who gets the chills at the thought of BPA, a synthetic estrogen linked to reproductive cancers. Nena Baker wrote a book, The Body Toxic: How the Hazardous Chemistry of Everyday Things Threatens Our Health and Well-being , on this very subject, and joined Laura in the studio to discuss what can be done about these frightening chemicals. Noting that neither Republicans nor Democrats want their kids ingesting harmful substances, Baker called for government action. "We can't shop our way out of this problem."