The Nation
Greg Mitchell: How WikiLeaks Fuels the Traditional Media's Headlines
- Title
- Greg Mitchell: How WikiLeaks Fuels the Traditional Media's Headlines
- Runtime
- 5:49
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- The Wall Street Journal recently launched their new WikiLeaks-imitation website, SafeHouse. The reception of the new venture has been lukewarm at best, as critics were quick to point out the site's lack of basic security. At the 2011 National Conference for Media Reform in Boston, Greg Mitchell, who has been blogging the WikiLeaks story for The Nation for over one hundred and fifty days now, spoke with Nation intern Kevin Gosztola about the way old media sites are trying to catch up to WikiLeaks.
Free speech, traditional media versus new media, transparency versus secrecy and who will be the "gatekeepers" are some of the most pressing issues that stem from WikiLeaks' operations, Mitchell argues. Even the New York Times, Mitchell says, relies on WikiLeaks for a steady stream of information.
For more videos visit www.TheNation.com
- Title
- Grace Lee Boggs: The Next American Revolution
- Runtime
- 8:45
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- Americans are ready for a fundamental change. Not a change of who gets to exercise power over others or a change in the material abundance available to us, but an evolution of humanity. This is the message that legendary philosopher, activist and community organizer Grace Lee Boggs delivers in her new book The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for The Twenty-first Century, written with University of Michigan Associate Professor Scott Kurashige.
In this video, shot at The Brecht Forum in New York City on April 15, Boggs and Kurashige join Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman to explain the details of this vision for an alternative society.
—Video courtesy of Palenque Films and Kique Cubero.
- Title
- Bringing Feminist Journalism to the Mainstream
- Runtime
- 20:47
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- Breaking into the mainstream media dialogue with a feminist story can be a challenge. Fortunately, there's a whole host of writers and editors working to produce stories relevant to women, and to prove that these stories can be successful. At the 2011 Women, Action and the Media (WAM!) New York City conference, a group of these writers and editors came together for a panel conversation on how to shift the mainstream media dialogue in a more feminist-friendly direction. Moderated by freelance journalist Sarah Seltzer, the panel featured ColorLines blogger Akiba Solomon, Associate Editor of AlterNet Lauren Kelley and Executive Editor of Raw Story Megan Carpentier.
How can writers deal with nasty comment sections? Write effectively for audiences without a background in feminism? And, perhaps most importantly, how can writers make a living covering these issues? The panel tackles these issues and more.
For more videos, visit www.TheNation.com.
- Title
- Stephen Vavrus: Extreme Weather Is Man-Made
- Runtime
- 3:01
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- Humans have grown accustomed to the current climate, says Stephen Vavrus, a Senior Scientist with the Center for Climatic Research in Madison, Wisconsin, in this interview from The Nation and On The Earth Productions. But the earth's delicate climate balance is now undergoing a radical, man-made transformation, and the changes will disrupt much in our world. Vavrus argues that we are now witnessing the immediate effects of climate change in the growing number of floods, droughts, snowstorms, heat waves and other unusual weather events going on around the world. According to Vavrus, scientists are convinced that extreme weather will continue to increase as climate change gets worse.
For more videos, visit www.TheNation.com
- Title
- The Diversifying Feminist Blogosphere
- Runtime
- 1:05:44
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- The feminist blogosphere has exploded over the past few years, in both size and influence. At the 2011 Women, Action and the Media (WAM!) New York City conference, some of the leading voices in this online space for women weighed in on what the growth of the feminist blogosphere means for the online activist community and for media in general. Moderated by The Nation's web editor, Emily Douglas, the panel featured bloggers Lori Adelman, Irin Carmon, Amanda Marcotte and Andrea Plaid.
The bloggers describe the growing presence of online pieces written by women that cover topics relating to women's issues as a new era of female journalism. In the absence of the institutional barriers of traditional journalism, the Internet has opened up the media to a wider spectrum of women's voices than ever before.
"It's not just trying to promote our own views and get them out to bigger audiences. Its also just being a platform for people whose voices are not heard, or who ar...
- Title
- Dr. Margaret Flowers: Taking on Corporate Power in Politics
- Runtime
- 3:57
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- Washington has been telling us for a long time now that the country faces huge deficits. Because of that, the politicians argue, corporations should be able to pay less in taxes in order to stimulate the economy. But Dr. Margaret Flowers, a pediatrician and full-time advocate for a single-payer healthcare system in the United States with Physicians for a National Health Program, hardly agrees with this narrative. A key organizer of an April 15 protest at a Bank of America branch in New York City's Union Square, she spoke with The Nation about the importance of protesting corporations like Bank of America.
When she and others were pushing for real health reform in Congress, she says she learned that "corporations run our political process." We have to take on "concentrated corporate power," she says, or else we won't get the solutions that this country needs.
For more videos, visit www.TheNation.com
- Title
- Ethan McCord: Incidents Like 'Collateral Murder' Happen Almost Daily in Iraq
- Runtime
- 11:01
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- Just over a year ago, WikiLeaks released footage from a gunsight camera of an Apache helicopter engaged in an attack that killed two journalists and eight civilians in Baghdad. The "Collateral Murder" video, as it came to be known, was a shocking document of America's war in Iraq, and was greeted with a firestorm of controversy on its release. One of the first soldiers on the scene after the air attack, Ethan McCord, is now the subject of a short documentary, Incident in New Baghdad, which will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York next week.
McCord, in New York for the festival premiere, told the story of what he experienced while saving two children wounded in the incident. When he returned to the Forward Operating Base, he requested mental health support to deal with the scenes he had witnessed. He was laughed at and told to "suck it up."
According to McCord, what Americans can see in the video is "one incident of many," and that similar abuses ...
- Title
- Mark Hertsgaard and James Hansen: Adapting to Climate Change Now
- Runtime
- 1:17:27
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- Global climate change has arrived, and it's more than a hundred years ahead of schedule. According to The Nation's Mark Hertsgaard, whose twenty years of climate reporting helped him craft his new book, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, the only option left requires not only reducing carbon emissions, but also adapting to the effects of man-made global warming already underway.
At the Open Society Institute in New York City on Thursda, April 14, Hertsgaard joined renowned NASA climatologist Dr. James Hansen for a conversation on how we can best adapt to and confront climate change. One of the biggest hurdles to effectively dealing with our warming planet, the two agree, is the anti-science blockade the American right has set up against any and all carbon reducing policies.
For more videos, visit www.TheNation.com
- Title
- Protesters to Bank of America: Pay Your Taxes
- Runtime
- 5:30
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- On April 15, in the run up to this year's Tax Day, hundreds of protesters descended on a Bank of America branch in Union Square, New York City. They demanded that big banks start paying their fair share of taxes and stop foreclosures, and they also called for the government to break up banks that are "too big to fail." Around fifty people entered the lobby of a nearby Bank of America branch with signs reading, "Stop Foreclosures! People Before Profits!" and "We pay our taxes. Why doesn't Bank of America?"
For more videos, visit www.TheNation.com
- Title
- Ahmed Shihab-Eldin: Will Social Media Democratize the Arab World?
- Runtime
- 6:31
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- Al Jazeera English's Ahmed Shihab-Eldin's new show, The Stream, which debuts today, has an ambitious goal: Shihab-Eldin wants The Stream to "leverage voices who often don't make it into mainstream media" by engaging wired communities across the world.
Shihab-Eldin spoke with The Nation at the 2011 National Conference for Media Reform in Boston about how he was one of the few in the media who began to follow Tunisia before it was clear a revolution was unfolding. He talks about how the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa all began as "popular uprisings," not religious uprisings. And, he adds that his new show will take a bottom-up look at many of the ongoing uprisings and examine how social media is helping people circumvent oppression.
"The potential democratization of the Arab world is directly related to the potential democratization of media," concludes Shihab-Eldin.
For videos, visit www.TheNation.com.
- Title
- Marcy Wheeler: Is the Department of Defense Leak-Proof?
- Runtime
- 6:28
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- In 2008, someone was able to infect the Department of Defense's computer network with malware by using a simple thumb drive. DOD tightened its policy toward its classified information, yet two years later, Pfc. Bradley Manning was allegedly able to walk in with a CD labeled "Lady Gaga" and download highly sensitive databases.
According to Firedoglake's Marcy Wheeler, even now DOD is dragging its feet on protecting its classified network, SIPRnet. Speaking with The Nation at this year's National Conference for Media Reform, Wheeler asks, if the information that Manning allegedly leaked is so sensitive, why has DOD not taken basic security measures to protect their databases?
For more videos visit www.TheNation.com
- Title
- Anand Gopal: How Egyptians Took Over Tahrir Square
- Runtime
- 12:55
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- During the Egyptian uprising, a fundamental transformation of society took place. Egyptians began to completely rethink their role in society and the way their society was structured. At the Left Forum on March 20, Nation contributor Anand Gopal spoke about what he saw when he was in Tahrir Square during the uprising.
Gopal tells the story of Egyptians adding new "elements of order" to Tahrir Square each day during the protests. They took over establishments to meet their own neeeds, turning Pizza Hut into an organizing center. KFC became a clinic, one with medical attention of such quality that people were coming to get care there because it was better than what they would get at other clinics.
For more videos, visit www.TheNation.com
- Title
- Revisiting Chernobyl's Nuclear Dead Zone
- Runtime
- 21:58
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- On April 26, 1986, a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine exploded, precipitating the worst nuclear disaster in history. Nuclear fallout rained over Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, and the nearby town of Pripyat had to be completely evacuated.
In 2006, On The Earth Productions went to Chernobyl to see the sarcophagus that surrounds the plant and to speak to those effected by the disaster. One guide explains that Pripyat was built to "service" the nuclear plant, and that the town bore the brunt of the radioactive fallout. At the Chernobyl museum, a guide who was born in the area explains that the soldiers who worked so hard to clean up and stabilize the situation in the aftermath of the disaster were some of the first victims of the radiation.
But could the disaster of Chernobyl happen again? In a revealing segment that echoes the unfolding crisis at Japan's Fukushima plant, the museum guide explains that the plant was built on a fault li...
- Title
- Rob Hopkins: How Climate Change Puts Globalization in Reverse
- Runtime
- 33:51
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- Painting climate change as sheer disaster without offering an alternative vision blows people's world to pieces and offers them nothing. This is what Rob Hopkins, an environmental grassroots campaign award-winner, sees as a significant challenge to roping people into cutting their carbon emissions. Hopkins speaks about his global forecast in this thirteenth, and final, video in the series "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate" from The Nation and On The Earth Productions. The future world will be much more localized, which is not such a gloomy picture, he says.
For more videos, visit www.TheNation.com
- Title
- Online Journalism's Silver Lining
- Runtime
- 28:50
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- While the press grapples with how to make Internet journalism profitable with varying success, there's a silver lining to the transformation the media scene is currently undergoing. The Internet, and social media in particular, has enabled a more inclusive national dialogue, author and media technologist Deanna Zandt told the audience at the closing plenary of the Women, Action & the Media (WAM!) New York City chapter conference last weekend. This, she says, means its harder for the power holds of big media conglomerates to squash voices from below.
For more videos like this, visit www.TheNation.com
- Title
- Joel Salatin: Breaking Free From Factory Farms
- Runtime
- 12:37
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- In this twelfth video in the series "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate" from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, American farmer, lecturer and author Joel Salatin outlines the key issues America faces as its citizens increasingly rely on factory farms, concentrated animal feeding operations that require cheap energy in order to operate profitably. He condemns regulations that appear to be on the books to benefit animal factories and prevent individuals from farming sustainably.
To learn more about "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate," and to see the other videos in the series, visit www.TheNation.com.
- Title
- John Ikerd: Dwindling Energy Resources Will Put The Economy at Risk
- Runtime
- 8:12
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- In this twelfth video in the series "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate" from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, Professor Emeritus of Agricultural Economics of the University of Missouri at Columbia John Ikerd argues that humans cannot wait much longer to address the reality that economic growth is unsustainable—because the world is running out of energy resources. "We simply can't continue to grow at the rate we've been growing in the past."
You can learn more about "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate," and watch the other videos in the series, at www.TheNation.com.
- Title
- Lester Brown: The Planet's Scarcest Resource Is Time
- Runtime
- 32:40
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- In this eleventh video in the series "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate" from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, analyst, author and founder of the Earth Policy Institute Lester Brown discusses how unprepared the world really is for the growing effects of climate change. "Economists doing supply and demand projections are largely unaware" of the scale of the resource crises facing the world, Brown says, and "food is going to be the weak link for our civilization as it was for so many earlier civilizations."
To learn more about "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate," and to see the other videos in the series, visit www.TheNation.com.
- Title
- Jean Laherrère: Why Cheap Energy Is a Bad Thing
- Runtime
- 9:05
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- In this tenth video in the series "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate" from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, petroleum geophysicist and author Jean Laherrère explains that we are in the current energy crisis not only because fuel is running out, but because it's cost is too cheap. Laherrère, a former TOTAL oil company employee, used his insider knowledge to co-author a game-changing 1998 article, "The End of Cheap Oil," which studied oil depletion based on the most accurate database of the world's oilfields at the time. The article's findings were not reassuring.
- Title
- Thom Hartmann: Corporations Are Fueling Our Peak Oil Crisis
- Runtime
- 13:50
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- In this ninth video in the series "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate" from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, author and radio and television host Thom Hartmann urges us to realize that "the unholy alliance of corporation and government is every bit as destructive as the alliance of church and state was perceived to be two hundred years ago." We have to to fight back against the corporate capture of government, Hartmann says, because the companies profiting off our addiction to oil are doing everything in their power to keep us on our destructive course.
Visit www.thenation.com to learn more about "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate," and to see the other videos in the series.
- Title
- Greg Palast: We're Not Running Out of Oil, Just Cheap Oil
- Runtime
- 13:39
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- In this eighth video in the series "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate" from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, investigative journalist and author Greg Palast says the era of cheap fuel is over. Now energy companies are scouring the globe for oil, often being forced to work in more dangerous and expensive conditions.
Visit www.thenation.com to learn more about "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate," and to see the other videos in the series.
- Title
- Audio Slide Show: Pictures From Cairo's Protests
- Runtime
- 5:10
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- As protests escalated in Egypt Thursday, January 27, The Nation interviewed American student Anna Day in Cairo via Skype to get a first-hand account of the unrest that has flooded Egyptian streets over the last week.
Visit www.TheNation.com for more coverage of the protests in Egypt.
- Title
- Dmitry Orlov: Peak Oil Lessons From The Soviet Union
- Runtime
- 29:06
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- Dmitry Orlov, engineer and author, warns that the US's reliance on diminishing fuel supplies might be sending it down the same path the Soviet Union took before it collapsed.
In this fifth video in the series "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate" from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, Orlov, who was an eyewitness to the collapse of the Soviet Union, asserts that run-away debt and national bankruptcy will lead the US to its demise, just as it did for Moscow. As oil becomes more expensive and scarcer, the US will no longer be able to finance its importation and the economy will hit a wall, he says.
"Sixty percent of all of our transportation fuels are imported—a lot of that is on credit. A large chunk of the trade deficit is actually in transportation fuels. When those stop arriving because of our inability to borrow more money, then the economy is at a standstill," he says.
Visit www.thenation.com to learn more about "Peak Oil and a Changing C...
- Title
- Noam Chomsky: How Climate Change Became a 'Liberal Hoax'
- Runtime
- 21:50
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- In this sixth video in the series "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate" from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, linguist, philosopher and political activist Noam Chomsky talks about the Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute and other business lobbies enthusiastically carrying out campaigns "to try and convince the population that global warming is a liberal hoax." According to Chomsky, this massive public relations campaign has succeeded in leading a good portion of the population into doubting the human causes of global warming.
Known for his criticism of the media, Chomsky doesn't hold back in this clip, laying blame on mainstream media outlets such as the New York Times, which will run frontpage articles on what meteorologists think about global warming. "Meteorologists are pretty faces reading scripts telling you whether it's going to rain tomorrow," Chomsky says. "What do they have to say any more than your barber?" All this is part of the media's pu...
- Title
- Bill McKibben: Why Climate Change Is the Most Urgent Challenge We Face
- Runtime
- 28:11
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- Bill McKibben, author and founder of the international environmental campaign 350.org, says that a global campaign to curb climate change, the ecological devastation that will result could make our planet uninhabitable. His appeal to citizens and policy-makers, the sixth video in the series "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate" from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, is a call to action as much as it is a sobering account of the damage we're already doing to our environment.
Go to www.thenation.com to learn more about "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate," and to see the other videos in the series.
- Title
- James Howard Kunstler: Peak Oil and Our Financial Decline
- Runtime
- 36:38
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- In this fourth video in the series "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate" from The Nation magazine and On The Earth Productions, James Howard Kunstler discusses how finance and energy are running neck and neck to fuel the end of advanced industrial civilization.
For more videos in the series, visit www.TheNation.com.
- Title
- Naomi Klein: The Search for BP's Oil
- Runtime
- 7:17
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- In the aftermath of the April 2010 explosion on BP's Deepwater Horizon oilrig, the media was saturated with images of oil-streaked Gulf Coast water and birds coated in a toxic mix of petroleum and dispersant. But as Naomi Klein writes in "The Search for BP's Oil" in this week's issue of the magazine, when "the spill-cam was switched off and it became clear that there would be no immediate mass die-offs among dolphins and pelicans... most of us were pretty much on to the next telegenic disaster." When Klein visited the Gulf in early December aboard the research vessel Weatherbird II, however, the very real—if harder to spot—effects of the spill were still being felt.
- Title
- Naomi Klein: The Mystery of the Black Goo
- Runtime
- 1:42
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- When The Nation's Naomi Klein traveled to the Gulf of Mexico in December to report on the aftermath of BP's Deepwater Horizon spill, she saw disturbing signs of the oil's destruction. But after she left, the research crew aboard the Weatherbird II encountered a slimy substance made up of dead plankton and other organisms coating the ocean floor that none of them had ever seen before. Where did this black goo come from? Video by Jacqueline Soohen and Big Noise Films.
Video by Brian Zelinski with thanks to the USF research crew aboard the WeatherBird II.
- Title
- Richard Heinberg: Peak Oil and the Globe's Limitations
- Runtime
- 25:51
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- Richard Heinberg, senior fellow with the Post Carbon Institute and the author of The Party's Over, Peak Everything and, most recently, Blackout, discusses the phenomenon of peak oil and how it will affect life on this planet.
- Title
- Nicole Foss: We Need Freedom of Action To Confront Peak Oil
- Runtime
- 39:39
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- In the third video in the series "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate" from The Nation and On The Earth productions, co-editor of The Automatic Earth, Nicole M. Foss, explains how energy relates to the economy and what our impending energy crisis will look like. Foss discusses the issues associated with peak oil in financial rather than environmental terms, because she finds that peak oil has much more to do with finance than it does with climate change.
Foss talks about what she calls a "false positive feedback loop," which involves optimism leading to "caution being thrown to the wind." When this happens, Foss believes that people become angry. Succumbing to fear and anger might lead to engagement in destructive behavior, which would make it harder for society to confront peak oil and climate change.
Reacting to former vice president Dick Cheney, who once said "the American way of life is not negotiable," Foss says, "That's true because reality is not going to n...
- Title
- Peak Oil and a Changing Climate
- Runtime
- 20:04
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- The scientific community has long agreed that our dependence on fossil fuels inflicts massive damage on the environment and our health, while warming the globe in the process. But beyond the damage these fuels cause to us now, what will happen when the world's supply of oil runs out? In a new video series from The Nation magazine and On The Earth Productions, Bill McKibben, Noam Chomsky, Nicole Foss, Richard Heinberg and other scientists, researchers and writers explain.
Visit TheNation.com for more videos in this series.
- Title
- Conversation: Laurie Penny on the UK Student Protests
- Runtime
- 10:10
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- "It felt like the relationship between state and citizen had totally broken down, like there was no order left," says New Statesman journalist Laurie Penny of the Parliament Square protest last week, as the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition voted to pass legislation that may effectively triple the cost of higher education in the UK. While Parliament voted, student protesters were shoved and batoned by police, and Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles found themselves in the middle of the mess.
Laurie joins us once again via Skype from London to talk about the protests, the vote, why the student movement is a definining moment for this generation of British youth--and once again, what we can learn from it and apply here.
- Title
- Briefing: Richard Kim & Betsy Reed
- Runtime
- 12:58
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- "I think deal is totally rotten, I think it's the best rotten deal the Democrats could've gotten," says Richard Kim of The Nation of Obama's tax cut compromise. His colleague Betsy Reed, though, notes that by compromising now, heading into an even more conservative Congress, Democrats are setting themselves up for far worse deals in the future--"Where are we going to draw the line ultimately?"
Betsy and Richard join us in studio to discuss the tax cut compromise, the health care bill, Bernie Sanders' eight-and-a-half-hour speech before the Senate, and strategies for progressive organizing under a Republican House and narrow Democratic majority in the Senate.
- Title
- Conversation: Bill McKibben: We Need Climate Justice Now
- Runtime
- 18:14
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- The environmental and climate justice movement isn't just about saving polar bears from melting ice, argues writer and 350.org founder Bill McKibben. It's about rebuilding connections and community, changing the way human beings live and working in solidarity with human rights organizations across the world to improve all of our lives. But the biggest stumbling block to the growth of a global climate justice movement? It's right under our noses: our own Congress.
Bill McKibben is a recipient of this year's Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship, and he joins The Nation on Grit TV in studio for a special one-on-one chat with Laura Flanders about the state of the climate justice movement, the Cancun talks, Obama's failure to act on climate change and what we can do about global warming before it's too late.
- Title
- Briefing: Tina Gerhardt on the Cancun Climate Summit
- Runtime
- 7:48
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- Briefing: Tina Gerhardt on the Cancun Climate Summit
The Nation on Grit TV
December 6, 2010
Though there is little hope for a binding international agreement resulting from the current round of climate talks held by the United Nations in Cancun this week, there is something different about the conversation at the summit. Tina Gerhardt reports that countries in attendance at the talks aren't hypothesizing about future consequences of global climate change, but instead are discussing the crises they are suffering right now. From drought to floods, weather patterns are shifting subtly in some places and more dramatically in others, and across the world, people are feeling the pain.
Gerhardt is reporting from the Cancun talks this week for The Nation, and she joins The Nation on Grit TV to give us an update on the situation, who's there, who's not and what we can hope for as a result of the talks.
- Title
- Conversation: Katha Pollitt on Conservative Feminism
- Runtime
- 10:57
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- Sarah Palin is busily trying to sell "conservative feminism" to the masses, but her idea of feminism certainly doesn't include reproductive choice or sexual freedom. Meanwhile, even the Pope has decided that it's better for sex workers to use condoms than to risk getting HIV or other sexually transmitted infections. So why does the new Congress include more new members opposed to women's right to control their bodies?
Katha Pollitt, Nation columnist and longtime prochoice activist, joins Laura in studio for a conversation about the latest on reproductive and sexual justice, Palinism, and more.
- Title
- Briefing: Ann Wright on the WikiLeaks Diplomatic Bombshell
- Runtime
- 10:47
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- "We were told as diplomats, 'Don't ever put anything in a cable you wouldn't want on the front page of a newspaper.' It shows that they're a lot of arrogant people, that the system itself wasn't checking itself," says Ann Wright, Retired United States Army Colonel and former State Department official, of the latest documents released from WikiLeaks. Meanwhile, several of the diplomatic cables released describe possibly illegal actions by the US government, and Wright notes that the chances of anyone being held accountable are slim.
Ann Wright joins The Nation on Grit TV to discuss the latest releases from WikiLeaks, what they tell us about the Defense and State departments and what should happen—but probably won't—to the people who have been breaking international laws.
- Title
- Commentary: Dave Zirin on Notre Dame's Rogue Football Team
- Runtime
- 2:09
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- It's past time that the storied Notre Dame football squad had its program suspended. First there was the death of 20-year-old team videographer Declan Sullivan in October. Now there is the emerging truth behind the September 10 suicide of first-year student Elizabeth Seeberg. Seeberg overdosed on antidepressants ten days after telling friends and campus police that a University of Notre Dame football player had sexually assaulted her. This is a football program that has officially gone off the rails.
- Title
- Conversation Part 2: Jean-Bertrand Aristide on Haiti in the Earthquake's Aftermath
- Runtime
- 8:05
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- It has not been a year since a catastrophic earthquake rocked Haiti and destroyed homes and cities, leaving people in desperate situations. And now as elections are approaching, Haitians face a cholera outbreak on top of everything. Nicolas Rossier, an award winning independent filmmaker and reporter whose latest films include American Radical and Aristide and the Endless Revolution, spoke to exiled former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide about the situation in his country and brought The Nation on Grit TV an exclusive first look at his two-hour conversation.
Rossier's conversation with Aristide ranges from Haiti, the former president's exile and possible return and why Aristide's party, still popular in Haiti, isn't allowed to participate in the upcoming election.
- Title
- Conversation Part 1: Nicolas Rossier on Haiti in the Earthquake's Aftermath
- Runtime
- 7:34
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- It's not a year since the earthquake rocked Haiti and destroyed homes and cities, leaving people in desperate situations. And now as elections are approaching, Haitians face a cholera outbreak on top of everything. Nicolas Rossier, an award winning independent filmmaker and reporter whose latest films include American Radical and Aristide and the Endless Revolution, spoke to exiled former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide about the situation in his country and brought us an exclusive first look at his two-hour conversation.
Rossier joins The Nation on Grit TV to describe the situation in Haiti, Aristide's enforced exile in South Africa and why his party, still popular in Haiti, isn't allowed to participate in the upcoming election.
- Title
- Briefing: Katrina vanden Heuvel on Confronting the Media's Flaws
- Runtime
- 8:45
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- "Average people must look at the screens and see the disconnect," says Nation editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel: "it's not left vs. right, it's top-down. It's establishment vs. people." So says Katrina vanden Heuvel of the average TV news show. Faced with the cynical coverage of the mainstream media, what can ordinary Americans do to work toward an alternative that more accurately reflects the problems facing our country today?
Katrina joins Laura Flanders on The Nation on Grit TV to explore the ramifications of the impending end of unemployment benefits for millions of Americans out of work, the members of Congress who will continue the fight for the people, real progressive taxation and what Obama can do with his executive power to get around a gridlocked Congress.
- Title
- Conversation: Anna Lenzer & Susan Leal on The Coming Water Crisis
- Runtime
- 11:04
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- "We're on a collision course with our finite supply of water," says Susan Leal, co-author of the new book Running Out of Water. It's not just that the supply is limited, she notes, it's our growing population, increased personal use, and climate change that are all playing into what journalist Anna Lenzer calls "the coming shock."
Susan and Anna join us in studio to discuss water: why we're limited, why privatization and drinking bottled water isn't the solution, and why the problem has a better chance of being solved when people work together rather than have decisions imposed by private corporations.
- Title
- Briefing: Laurie Penny on the UK Student Protests
- Runtime
- 6:20
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- "It's fair to smash up someone's future but not to smash up someone's lobby," says UK journalist Laurie Penny of the student protests in London last week, now being branded as "violent" and "out of control" by the press. But aside from one person who dropped a fire extinguisher off a building, Penny points out in her recent piece, the protests were free of violence against people, and property damage needs to be put in the proper perspective.
Penny joins The Nation on Grit TV via Skype from London, where she attended the protests and covered them for the New Statesman, to provide some perspective on the misunderstood events—and to fill us in on why they may be only the beginning for the growing student movement in the UK.
- Title
- Briefing: Dean Baker on Boosting the Economy by Saving Healthcare
- Runtime
- 8:29
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- Last week, a report by the leader's of Obama's deficit commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, recommended massive cuts across the budget, most significantly to Social Security and health care programs. But according to Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the report is "the wrong answer to not a problem." The report has now been roundly criticized by progressives for its seemingly-targeted cuts, but according to Dean, the real cause of the deficit remains hidden from most Americans: our ongoing healthcare crisis.
Baker joins The Nation on Grit TV via Skype from Washington, DC to talk about what can really be done to balance the budget and why we should be much more focused on creating jobs and really reforming healthcare than on slashing programs that benefit us all.
- Title
- Conversation: Dan Kalb on the Future of Climate Legislation
- Runtime
- 12:19
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- One of the few progressive victories to emerge from this year's elections was the defeat of corporate-supported Proposition 23 in California, which would have rolled back California's first-in-the-nation climate and environmental regulations, claiming that they were hurting the economy. Dan Kalb, California Policy Director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, notes that the coalition that fought Prop 23 was wide and broad, from faith groups to public interest groups to some corporations and even Republican Governor Schwarzenegger.
Kalb joins The Nation on Grit TV via Skype from California to explore the future of climate legislation and how we can push for a green economy with a Republican-controlled House, and to remind us that the majority of Americans "want a clean energy future."
- Title
- Briefing: Greg Mitchell MSNBC's Olbermann About-Face
- Runtime
- 11:42
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- The big story last week was the elections: Republicans take back the House! Nearly $5 billion spent on campaigns across the country—most of it from faceless corporate donors! But by the weekend the focus had shifted: Keith Olbermann was suspended from MSNBC for donating money to three Democratic candidates. Not a peep, of course, about the amount that MSNBC's parent company, GE, had given throughout the campaign season.
In this environment, The Nation's media blogger, Greg Mitchell, joins The Nation on Grit TV to talk about George W. Bush's book tour, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace joking with Jon Stewart about Fox's employing Republican candidates for 2012 and a profile of The Nation in Monday's New York Times.
- Title
- Commentary: Laura Flanders on Haiti's Hurricane Struggles
- Runtime
- 2:14
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- Turning away from the US elections for a moment, we can find plenty of places suffering not from a hurricane of campaign cash, but from actual hurricanes, bringing with them immediate suffering but less coverage.
Haiti was all over the news when an earthquake hit the island months ago, but the coverage hasn't lasted. By way of update—Hurricane Tomas dumped rain and flooded already-battered towns like Leogane over the weekend but the island's said to have "dodged" the worst.
- Title
- Jeremy Scahill on how Obama is Expanding Bush's Wars
- Runtime
- 10:05
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- On this year's Nation Cruise, Katrina vanden Heuvel moderated a panel featuring Lt. General Robert Gard and Nation writers Jeremy Scahill, Stephen Cohen and John Nichols, who explored just how far Obama has diverted from his promise to end the culture of fear that led the US into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
According to Scahill, foreign policy isn't that different today from what it was during the Bush years—if anything, Obama has increased secrecy around issues like torture and targeted killings abroad, and has expanded the power of government to spy on US citizens.
- Title
- GRITtv Digs: The Anti-Choice Movement's Co-opting of Civil Rights Strategies
- Runtime
- 9:38
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- In the first installment of the new GRITtv Digs investigative series "Conspiracy Tactics," we were introduced to a new concept in the anti-choice movement: the co-opting of Civil Rights Movement language and strategies to break up the progressive coalition. In this segment, reproductive justice leaders in the African-American community question the sudden interest of white Conservatives in black women and their babies.
- Title
- Commentary: Laura Flanders
- Runtime
- 2:06
- Date posted
- 16 years ago
- Description
- The lesson Laura Flanders will be taking from these midterms? In a political climate of "sweep the bums out," there's always the matter of who gets swept in. And elected or not, there's still the question of how so many creeps got so far. That's the question that will last long after the election.
