The Nation Videos & Latest Coverage | The News AccessTheNewsAccess.com™

Conversation: Jeremy Scahill on US Military Actions in Yemen

Title: Conversation: Jeremy Scahill on US Military Actions in Yemen
Runtime: 5:22
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: This week, two bombs were found in packages in cargo holds on two planes bound from Yemen to the US. Is Yemen destined to become a new front in the "war on terror"? According to The Nation's Jeremy Scahill, though "there are guys in the special forces community that have been pushing and agitating for years for a greater US military presence there," US clandestine military actions have long extended into Yemen and other countries: "in reality though, the US has already been striking in Yemen for a couple of years. They've hit the country a number of times with Tomahawk cruise missile strikes and teams from the Joint Special Operations Command have been engaged in what are called kinetic operations on the ground where they're actually hunting down and killing individuals." Scahill joins Laura Flanders to explain how these operations have gone under the American public's radar, and why all the US's wars have been conspicuously absent from this year's election campaigns.

Title: Briefing: Jeremy Scahill
Runtime: 10:23
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: "The US has basically already lost the war in Afghanistan, if they even knew what victory was defined at in the beginning," says Jeremy Scahill, just back from two weeks reporting unembedded in that country. The Taliban there are not unlike the Tea Party here, he notes, not popular in themselves but rather as a protest against the failures of the current regime.

Jeremy discusses his trip to Afghanistan with GRITtv's Laura Flanders.

Nation Conversations: Jim Hightower and Chris Hayes on Populism in Politics

Title: Nation Conversations: Jim Hightower and Chris Hayes on Populism in Politics
Runtime: 5:35
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: For the last twelve years, the annual Nation Cruise has facilitated numerous opportunities for fruitful dialogue among America's leading progressives and The Nation's readership. This year's cruise started off with a panel moderated by Calvin Trillin on the current political moment, with Katrina vanden Heuvel, Jim Hightower, Melissa Harris-Perry, Chris Hayes and John Nichols offering their analyses.

With Hightower advocating for the power of populist movements and Harris-Perry emphasizing the importance of voting for representatives who will push forward progressive policies in Congress and the Senate, Katrina vanden Heuvel brings these different strains together by saying it is the "combination the people's movements and the electoral pieces that will bring about change."

The panelists agree that we are at a critical point where the actions of citizens matter, but reforming the deeply flawed political structure will be an ongoing struggle. "We suddenly feel s...

Conversation: Daniel Teweles and Dr. Martin Michaels on 10Questions

Title: Conversation: Daniel Teweles and Dr. Martin Michaels on 10Questions
Runtime: 9:45
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: In 2008, CNN and YouTube paired up to pose citizen questions to presidential candidates through YouTube videos. But as Daniel Teweles of the Personal Democracy Forum notes, the questions were still selected by journalists and were all presented in a typical debate format. For this election season, however, the Personal Democracy Forum has a new project, 10Questions, where citizens can pose questions to candidates in their local races, and the candidates post video responses on the Web for all to see.

Teweles joins Laura Flanders on The Nation on GRIT TV to talk about 10Questions, and ways that new media technology can improve accountability in our elections. They also check in with Dr. Martin Michaels, a physician from Georgia whose question about childhood health was answered by the candidates for governor of Georgia.

Briefing: Katrina vanden Heuvel and Hendrik Hertzberg

Title: Briefing: Katrina vanden Heuvel and Hendrik Hertzberg
Runtime: 12:49
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: "What we are seeing is a dagger directed at the heart of our democracy, with this money," says Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation, of the ongoing influx of corporate cash on election spending this cycle. She notes that this has been a $5 billion--with a B--election, with $1 billion spent just on the House, and no matter what Karl Rove tries to say, there is nowhere close to parity with spending from left-wing causes.

Katrina and Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker join Laura in studio for a discussion of the money flooding the election cycle, and to consider ways to counter the corrupting influence of cash on our political system. Is there a way to save the 2010 elections?

Conversation: Stephen F. Cohen on the Survivors of Stalin's Gulag

Title: Conversation: Stephen F. Cohen on the Survivors of Stalin's Gulag
Runtime: 10:26
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: According to Stephen F. Cohen, half of Russia looks back to Josef Stalin as a great leader and the other half as a genocidal murderer. This disconnect, and a longing for a stronger, secure state, can be seen in public debate over a memorial to the victims of the gulags, where more people died than in Hitler's death camps.

Cohen tells the story of the victims and their struggle to reenter society in his new book, The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin. Born of more than 30 years of research and personal experience, the book is a memoir as well as a history, and Cohen joins Laura in studio to discuss it, and the ongoing struggle to reconcile that period in Russian history.

Commentary: Betsy Reed on Lou Dobbs's Immigration Contradictions

Title: Commentary: Betsy Reed on Lou Dobbs's Immigration Contradictions
Runtime: 2:28
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: With her recent Nation article, "Lou Dobbs, American Hypocrite," investigative reporter Isabel Macdonald revealed that Dobbs—the former CNN host who made his name and fortune railing against the people he called "illegals"—had in fact relied on their labor for years for the upkeep of his multi-million dollar estates and show horses. The article made waves throughout the media and Dobbs was compelled to defend himself, insisting that because the workers were employed by third-party contractors, he was not technically guilty of hypocrisy. It didn't help that he had dismissed such excuses by employers as "ridiculous" when he still enjoyed his perch at CNN.

But according to Betsy Reed, The Nation's executive editor, all the attention given to Dobbs's hypocrisy risks obscuring the deeper lesson to learn from this case. "Undocumented workers are so thoroughly woven into the fabric of our economy that even a professional immigrant-basher like Dobbs couldn't avoid relying on t...

Title: Briefing: Chris Hayes and Erica Payne
Runtime: 12:04
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: "Vulnerable Democrats are begging donors for cash—$2,400 at a time, while their colleagues are sitting on millions of dollars they could unleash with a pen stroke." So wrote Erica Payne of the Agenda Project, pointing out that the control of the entire House could be in the hands of a few Democrats in safe seats.

That's just one of the problems with a severely dysfunctional election system overly dependent on private cash, notes The Nation's Chris Hayes, who joins Payne and Laura Flanders on The Nation on Grit TV to talk about the campaign season thus far and the potential for a little bit of money to go a long way in the right place.

Title: Conversation: Greg Mitchell
Runtime: 9:36
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: If you thought the media frenzy, voter intimidation and character defamation that characterize today's elections is a hallmark of these modern times, think again. The Nation's Media Fix blogger Greg Mitchell takes us back to the origins of media campaigning with Upton Sinclair's 1934 bid for California governor. Mitchell, author of The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics, says and West Virginia's Republican Senate-hopeful John Raese's recent campaign video debacle is just one more example of a long history of candidates manipulating the media for political gains, albeit one that went horribly awry.

Title: Briefing: Ari Berman & Karen Finney
Runtime: 12:18
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: Well as the Tea Partiers continue to prove they may be more than just a passing trend - at least in the fast-approaching midterms - we ask, where did the Democrats go so wrong in mobilizing their base? Did Obama's pandering to the center and big business alienate too many voters who believed in change? And what could he have learned from Howard Dean in building a movement?

Ari Berman, Nation Contributor and Author of Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics and Democratic Strategist, Karen Finney who served as the Director of Communications at the Democratic National Committee drop by GRITtv.

Title: Lou Dobbs, American Hypocrite
Runtime: 5:12
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: There's no doubt that the reported $6 million a year Dobbs raked in while bashing undocumented immigrants at CNN has helped him amass real estate, and boosted his family's profile in the elite world of horse shows. But without undocumented immigrants, just who would look after Dobbs's properties?

Title: Conversation: John Conyers
Runtime: 8:14
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: "The reason there are so many Detroiters here at this march is that we're trying to climb out of a continuing depression that has yet to be addressed by the trillions of dollars we've spent to pull Wall Street out of its malaise," says Congressman John Conyers, chair of the judiciary committee and longtime representative from Michigan.

Conyers checked in with Laura and Thom Hartmann at this week's One Nation rally to talk about jobs, justice and the midterm elections.

Title: Conversation: Rev. Jesse Jackson
Runtime: 6:39
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: "Forty-seven years later, we are free but not equal," said Rev. Jesse Jackson, from the One Nation rally in Washington, D.C. this weekend. In 1963, Jackson stood alongside Martin Luther King Jr. during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. For this weekend's One Nation rally, Jackson traveled to D.C. from Detroit, where the continuing fallout of our devastated economy has created a city in dire need of sustainable jobs and a populace lacking such basic resources as access fresh food.

Jackson spoke with Laura Flanders and Thom Hartmann about whether America today is one nation or many, the definition of freedom and religion and how we can fight for economic justice.

Commentary: John Nichols on Russ Feingold's Future

Title: Commentary: John Nichols on Russ Feingold's Future
Runtime: 2:11
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: Russ Feingold has consistently been a progressive Senator to be counted on: the sole vote against the PATRIOT Act, a principled vote against bailing out the banks, a tireless fighter for civil liberties, and a man willing to stand up to his own party as well as the opposition. So it's no surprise that he's a prime target for conservatives.

John Nichols is from Feingold's home state of Wisconsin, and when he came by our studio recently, he gave us his thoughts on Feingold's race to keep his seat.

Title: Briefing: Bill Fletcher Jr.
Runtime: 8:48
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: "We need a grassroots coalition that's comparable to the Tea Party movement in many respects. It needs to be fairly decentralized, easy for people to join, and it needs to be audacious," says Bill Fletcher Jr. of the way forward after the success of this past weekend's One Nation rally in Washington, D.C. This rally, he notes, needs to not simply be a nice day out for progressives--it needs to be a turning of the tide, a reversal of course away from anger and toward solidarity.

Fletcher joins guest host Richard Kim of The Nation to discuss the rally this weekend, the media's reaction to it, and what it really means to be audacious.

Conversation: Eric Foner on Obama and Lincoln's Legacy

Title: Conversation: Eric Foner on Obama and Lincoln's Legacy
Runtime: 10:47
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: When Barack Obama took office as president, many people compared him to the man who ended slavery in the U.S.--Abraham Lincoln. But, historian Eric Foner notes, despite Obama's calls for progressives to hold him accountable, he doesn't seem to actually like what that entails, whereas Lincoln actually appreciated critique.

What else could Obama learn from Lincoln? What could we? Eric Foner joins Laura in studio to discuss this as well as his upcoming book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.

Commentary: John Nichols on Pledge to America

Title: Commentary: John Nichols on Pledge to America
Runtime: 2:20
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: The Republicans like to go back to old playbooks, it seems--this time they're remembering 1994's "Contract with America" with the "Pledge to America." But, John Nichols notes, it's just the same old policies with a fancy new cover. Nichols stopped by the GRITtv studio recently to record this commentary.

Title: Briefing: Betsy Reed & Rebecca Traister
Runtime: 12:28
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: Sarah Palin has declared that the "mama Grizzlies" are taking over the Republican party, and newspapers have seized on the meme of Republican women as if they're an undiscovered species. But is there anything new about this year's crop of conservative female candidates, and is there something the Democrats aren't grabbing, an opportunity missed?

Joining us to discuss are two veteran political journalists who've spent years watching right-wing women as well as their progressive counterparts: Rebecca Traister, senior writer at Salon and author of the new book Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women, and Betsy Reed, executive editor at The Nation and co-editor of Going Rouge: Sarah Palin, An American Nightmare.

Commentary: Anne Elizabeth Moore on Cambodia's Striking Garment Workers

Title: Commentary: Anne Elizabeth Moore on Cambodia's Striking Garment Workers
Runtime: 2:35
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: Commentary: Anne Elizabeth Moore on Cambodia's Striking Garment Workers
The Nation on Grit TV
September 24, 2010

Earlier this week, workers in Cambodia's garment industry walked off their jobs over stagnant wages and the exploitative business practices of their employers. Sixty thousand began the strike Monday. Twice as many Tuesday. By Wednesday, labor leaders were estimating that 210,000 workers had walked out of 95 factories in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. By Thursday morning, a meeting was set to renegotiate wages.

Approximately 346,000 people are employed in the nation's garment sector— making sports shoes and clothes—and the industry is the country's third largest. Ninety percent of Cambodia's garment workers are female, and less than three percent of them ever make it to management. Girls are sent from the provinces to work in the factories by families who can't make ends meet farming. Their income directly supports, according to the UN, 1.6 ...

Conversation: Roberta Gratz and John Mollenkopf on Cities in Decline

Title: Conversation: Roberta Gratz and John Mollenkopf on Cities in Decline
Runtime: 11:27
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: As budget crunches slam cities and urban industry continues to decline, the divide in the US right now often looks as much like a split between cities and rural areas as it does between "red" states and "blue" states. So what would pioneering author and urban activist Jane Jacobs have said about it all? What about Robert Moses, credited with shaping the modern American city?

Roberta Gratz, author of The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, and John Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, explain what can be done to rebuild American cities so that they are strong and work for everyone.

Title: Briefing: Dean Baker
Runtime: 11:29
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: "Poverty is a one-day event, we get a report released and we're going to talk about poverty, but every day we hear what the stock market does," says Dean Baker, GRITtv economics correspondent. The problem with that kind of coverage, Baker notes, is that "many more people will experience poverty than will strike it rich in the stock market." Millions of Americans experience poverty not as a one-day affair, but as a constant, grinding force in their lives.

Baker joins us via Skype to talk about Elizabeth Warren's sort-of-appointment, the whinging of the rich over tax increases, and Bill Clinton's comments about the recession's end, among other things.

Title: Conversation: Naomi Klein
Runtime: 10:01
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: "We have to build that independent left. It has to be so strong and so radical and so militant and so powerful that it becomes irresistible."

Who better to say such a thing than Naomi Klein, Nation columnist, author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo and longtime rabblerouser? Naomi makes a special visit to the GRITtv studio to talk about the recent G20 meetings in her hometown of Toronto, about Obama's recent return to a kind of populism, the looming midterm elections in the US, her reporting on the BP disaster in the Gulf and what we can do to channel the growing rage in this country and in the world into a true progressive movement.

Title: Briefing: Melissa Harris-Lacewell
Runtime: 9:48
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: "We need to be covering the left as much as we cover, with anxiety, the right," notes Nation contributor and Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell. The lack of coverage of progressive movements, protests, and actions in the face of a loud, angry and well-funded right wing can be disheartening, but we know they are out there, and in some cases fighting hard to keep a Tea Party backed Republican party from taking back seats in Congress during the midterms.

Melissa joins us in studio to discuss the upcoming elections, the media message, and what progressives can do to fight back.

Conversation: Barbara Crossette & Anja Rudiger

Title: Conversation: Barbara Crossette & Anja Rudiger
Runtime: 12:22
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: The Obama administration submitted its first report on its own human rights record to the United Nations Human Rights Council, becoming the first U.S. administration to do so--the Bush administration declined to join the council. The report for the first time showed the government admitting to its own failings, particularly in the area of economic and social rights.

Barbara Crossette, the U.N. reporter for The Nation, covered the story for the magazine, and she joins us in studio along with Anja Rudiger of the National Economic & Social Rights Initiative to discuss the report, the next steps, and what all this means for the state of human rights in this country. Are we moving forward? How far do we have to go? And will we be able to acknowledge social and economic rights as fundamental human rights?

Briefing: Katrina vanden Heuvel on Class Warfare from the Top Down

Title: Briefing: Katrina vanden Heuvel on Class Warfare from the Top Down
Runtime: 10:19
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: Class warfare is not, as John McCain would have you believe, overturning Bush's tax cuts for the rich. "Class warfare is when you have corporations sitting on $1.8 trillion," says Katrina vanden Heuvel. While the economy stagnates and our infrastructure crumbles, Bush's breaks for the wealthiest Americans are doing far more harm than good. But what is Obama doing about it? "The spine of this White House," says vanden Heuvel, "is wobbly."

Meanwhile, the real class war is happening in the same direction it always has—from the top down. When people like Elizabeth Warren are demonized and deficits are a point of obsession, it's not the rich who have to worry. Vanden Heuvel joins The Nation on GRITtv to explain why the Obama administration continues to defend the rich to the detriment of the rest of the country.

Title: Briefing: Richard Kim
Runtime: 7:36
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: "Who needs gay bashing when you have the Ground Zero mosque?" Richard Kim, senior editor at The Nation, asks guest host Esther Armah. In a week when gay and lesbian couples may see obstacles to their right to marry in California fall away, he notes, right-wing media is strangely silent on the issue. Even Glenn Beck is suddenly sounding a libertarian note.

Instead, it's all about the "Ground Zero mosque" even as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown decide not to pursue their case to uphold Prop 8. The Ninth Circuit and the Supreme Court will rule on the case soon, but it seems that the fearmongering over the issue has shifted dramatically. Even the dramatic exit of JetBlue flight attendent Stephen Slater has gotten more media--perhaps because Americans trapped in lousy jobs by the recession have bigger concerns than their neighbors' marriage.

Title: Briefing: Betsy Reed
Runtime: 10:00
Date posted: 16 years ago
Description: The battle for Congress--otherwise known as the 2010 midterm elections--is underway, and it seems that every bill that comes up for a vote is a campaign issue. Republicans are voting in a bloc against any money Obama asks for, including billions to help states continue to pay teachers, and Tea Party activists decry all government spending as bloated. Meanwhile, our wars continue in Iraq and Afghanistan, and once again a major media outlet--Time, this time--is using the body of a woman to make the case for occupation.

Betsy Reed, executive editor of The Nation, joins Laura in studio to discuss these stories and more for The Nation on GRITtv.

Title: The Nation TV Commercial 2010
Runtime: 1:08
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: Want to support high-quality investigative journalism, and counter the "Toxic Nonsense on the right?" Here is The Nation Magazine's pitch for your support in 2010. The ad will run widely on cable television starting this summer. If you want to support The Nation, share with friends - and tell us what you think of the ad in the comments.

Title: Conversation: Diane Ravitch
Runtime: 12:37
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: "We're lying to our kids," says professor and former charter school advocate and supporter of No Child Left Behind Diane Ravitch. High-stakes testing and punishing teachers for low-scoring kids is failing, according to her research; moreover, charter schools are only successful, when they are, because they can select the best students from the failing districts in which they are located.

In a new piece at The Nation, and in her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, Ravitch lays out the case against the policies she once supported. She joins Laura in studio to discuss the problems with education--and how Obama and Arne Duncan might be making things worse, not better.

Title: Commentary: Jaclyn Friedman
Runtime: 2:44
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: Nearly a month ago, the National Enquirer broke the news that a massage therapist in Oregon claimed to have been sexually assaulted by Al Gore. Since then, the media has snickered, rolled its eyes, and steadfastly refused to report the story. Instead, they've trotted out excuses in Gore's defense, often treating it as a simple choice between defending Gore's integrity or indulging in a base appetite for celebrity scandal, as if there wasn't a real possibility that a real 54-year-old woman had suffered a very real and violent assault.

Jaclyn Friedman, Executive Director of Women, Action & the Media, and editor of Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, joins The Nation on Grit TV to describe how the media should handle the sexual assault allegations against Gore.

Read Friedman's story at TheNation.com: http://www.thenation.com/article/37642/how-media-should-treat-sexual-assault-allegations-against-al-gore

Title: Briefing: Greg Mitchell
Runtime: 9:15
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: Everywhere you look, jobs are cut, programs are eliminated, and the fat is trimmed as closely as possible leaving only the bare bones of our society. Well, almost everywhere. It seems that for all the costs being cut surrounding education and employment benefits, a disproportionate amount of money has poured into intelligence, better known as the U.S. Military Industrial Complex. This imbalance in public spending and private contractors prompted the Washington Post to conduct a two-year long investigation into this hidden, growing world.

The Nation's Media FIX Blogger Greg Mitchell joined us in the studio to discuss this phenomenon, along with the recent PBS documentary "Turmoil and Triumph"--an uncomfortably flattering three-part documentary on George Shultz's three years as Secretary of State. Normally, PBS would not air an apparently biased piece, but, as Mitchell implies, both the media and the government work together to keep their people sorely in the dark.

Title: Briefing: JoAnn Wypijewski
Runtime: 8:59
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: November elections are coming up and democrats around the country are starting to wonder if they can hold onto the House. Author and Nation contributor JoAnn Wypijewski joins us in the studio to describe her on the ground tour of the United States -- talking to people, and figuring out the political fabric at stake. Her discoveries are that many Americans feel defenseless against catastrophes ranging from foreclosures to job loss to the BP oil spill -- but unlike the Great Depression, people are hiding their pain. Nevertheless, Republicans are trying to tap into this defenseless Achilles heel, using pervasive negativity to fuel their eternal "party of no."

Title: Commentary: Colin Robinson
Runtime: 2:37
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: Since its launch 15 years ago Amazon has grown to be, by some measure, the largest bookseller in the world. According to its founder Jeff Bezos, this ascent has been achieved by giving customers what they want: convenience, wide choice and low, low prices.

Of course everyone likes the availability of two million books on the site. And who could complain about discounts of 50% or more on bestsellers? But look beneath the surface and a less rosy picture emerges. It turns out that the way Amazon does business can be seriously damaging for the health of publishers, authors and, yes, those beloved customers too.

Briefing: Mark Hertsgaard and Sarah Laskow, Finding Louisiana's Methadone

Title: Briefing: Mark Hertsgaard and Sarah Laskow, Finding Louisiana's Methadone
Runtime: 11:10
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: Even Louisiana's greenest are against a moratorium on offshore drilling. This may seem absurd considering the seemingly irreversible devastation that BP's carelessness has inflicted on the land, but the Nation's Environmental Correspondent Mark Hertsgaard claims that oil to Louisiana is like heroin to an addict. It would be catastrophic to go cold-turkey but it's high time we started the weaning process.

Well, what is Louisiana's - and our nation's - methadone? Media Consortium Environmental Blogger, Sarah Laskow joins Mark to discuss Louisiana's green energy potential and whether or not we can hope for any progress on energy policy on the Hill.

Title: Violence Against LGBT Youth Behind Bars
Runtime: 11:29
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: Across the United States, the brutal and dysfunctional juvenile justice system sends queer youth to prison in disproportionate numbers, fails to protect them from violence and discrimination while they're inside and to this day condones attempts to turn them straight.

So wrote Daniel Redman in a terrifying new article in The Nation this week, where he investigated the treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth in the juvenile justice system. Redman joins us via Skype, along with Gabrielle Prisco of the Juvenile Justice Project at the Correctional Association of New York, to talk about the way the justice system fails all youth--and the reasons LGBT youth wind up in the system more often than straight teens.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Nation at Risk of Ignoring Jobs Crisis

Title: Katrina vanden Heuvel: Nation at Risk of Ignoring Jobs Crisis
Runtime: 2:47
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: The false apostles of austerity believe that imposing suffering on working people--and the most vulnerable among us--is how you show leadership in tough times.

They are cowards, not leaders.

Christian Parenti: BP & the Changing Energy Economy

Title: Christian Parenti: BP & the Changing Energy Economy
Runtime: 9:17
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: If the United States government is the largest energy consumer in the world, asks Nation contributing editor Christian Parenti, why doesn't it use its massive buying power to support real green, clean energy technologies--instead of subsidizing the catastrophic failures of oil giants like BP?

Parenti joins us in studio to point out that if the U.S. post office switched to electric cars, that subsidy alone would bring down the price and create infrastructure for the rest of the country. He also talks Bill Gates, more green technologies, and the war in Afghanistan.

Esther Kaplan: New Evidence on Detained Hikers in Iran

Title: Esther Kaplan: New Evidence on Detained Hikers in Iran
Runtime: 2:33
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: Since their arrest last July by Iranian forces near the Iraq border, three Americans — Shane Bauer, Josh Fattal and Sarah Shourd— have been at the center of a diplomatic struggle between Tehran and Washington. Esther Kaplan is Editor at the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute and has worked closely with Shane Bauer in the past. This week, the Investigative Fund and The Nation broke the story that the detained hikers were most likely arrested in Iraqi territory, not in Iran.

Esther gives us her thoughts on the ongoing fight to win the hikers' freedom and the role of investigative journalism in the matter.

Walter Mosley: Gesturing Towards Redemption

Title: Walter Mosley: Gesturing Towards Redemption
Runtime: 11:41
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: "Redemption is looking at ourselves, asking what we can do better instead of blaming our leaders," says Walter Mosley, author and Nation contributor. "We can't look to corporate media for our answers," he continues, "we have to look to ourselves."

Expressing political redemption through semi-spiritual language, Mosley joins The Nation on GritTV in the studio to discuss the late West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd's varied career, which was quite possibly one of redemption. Byrd was known for shifting his politics in accordance with his country and his constituency; while he once filibustered the Civil Rights Act, he also vehemently spoke out against the Iraq war and executive power. Should he be acknowledged for his progress and "redemption," or should that credit go to his constituents?

Dean Baker: Financial Reform or Lack Thereof?

Title: Dean Baker: Financial Reform or Lack Thereof?
Runtime: 8:25
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: Joining Laura Flanders on The Nation on Grit TV, Dean Baker, co-director of the Center on Economic Policy Research, says that though Obama's financial reforms may ultimately result in greater transparency in the way banks and big corporations do business, the changes will do little to combat rampant economic inequality and unemployment. What is sorely needed, Baker argues, is a fundamental change in the way Wall Street operates.

Dean Baker is part of a Nation forum on inequality to be published July 1 featuring Robert Reich, Orlando Patterson, Jeff Madrick, Dean Baker, Katherine Newmann and Matt Yglesias. The forum looks at the widening inequality gap in the recession and under President Obama, and at possible solutions.

Title: Tom Engelhardt: The American Way of War
Runtime: 10:07
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: Tom Engelhardt argues that most of the American public is oblivious to how the US government is garrisoning the planet, how we have long been in a perpetual state of war and other topics from his new book "The American Way of War."

Melissa Harris Lacewell: Progressive Identity Politics

Title: Melissa Harris Lacewell: Progressive Identity Politics
Runtime: 3:23
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: In her latest Nation column, Melissa Harris-Lacewell quotes South Pacific, a progressive musical of its time, saying, "You have to be taught to hate and fear, you have to be taught from year to year, it has to be drummed in your dear little ear." Alarmingly, schools in Arizona and Texas have begun to incorporate Rodgers and Hammerstein's ideas into their educational policies. Arizona Governor Jan Brewer recently signed a bill cutting state funding to schools offering ethnic studies classes and Texas has revised its history books in a way that lionizes segregationists and questions the need for the separation of church and state.

Harris-Lacewell wonders, Are young people inherently progressive enough to disregard these official policies, or do those on the left need to realize the importance of being carefully taught?

Max Fraser & Michael Whitney: The Convoluted Future of Labor

Title: Max Fraser & Michael Whitney: The Convoluted Future of Labor
Runtime: 12:22
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: None of the laborers cleaning up the gulf coast are even under a union contract in the first place, and despite the enormous growth under Andy Stern's leadership, current president Mary Kay Henry says that the SEIU is still fighting for paid sick days. After the labor movement poured millions into a battle they ultimately lost in Arkansas, trying to remove Blanche Lincoln, one of the senators who helped kill the Employee Free Choice Act, is the long-term alliance with the Democratic party in trouble?

Max Fraser of The Nation and Michael Whitney of Firedoglake join Laura Flanders in studio to deconstruct these present and potential future dilemmas of the labor movement in both their political and practical forms.

The Week Ahead: Richard Kim on Republican Private Property Hypocrisy

Title: The Week Ahead: Richard Kim on Republican Private Property Hypocrisy
Runtime: 6:43
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: Republicans say over and over that they're defending small government and private property, but when the hot air settles the real winner is corporate America, too often at the expense of the people the party purports to protect. Where is their party-loyal consideration for the private property of shrimpers in the Gulf coast? Restaurant owners? The property and livelihoods of so many other people affected by the Gulf spill?

Texas Congressman Joe Barton went so far last week as to apologize to BP for their deal with the Obama administration which will set aside $20 billion to deal with the repercussions of BP's spill, a deal Barton called a "shakedown." Nation Senior Editor Richard Kim joins Laura Flanders to discuss the corrupt politics that dictate these ironies and hypocrisies.

Title: Video From Aboard the Gaza Flotilla
Runtime: 5:51
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: Activist and filmmaker Iara Lee was aboard the Mavi Marmara on May 31 when the vessel was raided by the Israel Defense Forces. Though her camera and equipment were confiscated, she smuggled out an hour of footage.

After her release, Lee sat down with Nation managing editor Roane Carey to recount what she witnessed during the raid.

Jeremy Scahill: Minerals, WikiLeaks, and Blackwater for Sale

Title: Jeremy Scahill: Minerals, WikiLeaks, and Blackwater for Sale
Runtime: 9:05
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: In the wake of a rumor that WikiLeaks may soon publish a number of secret State Department cables, some are saying that the Pentagon is on the hunt for the whistleblowing organization's founder Julian Assange. On GRITtv with Laura Flanders, Nation writer and blogger Jeremy Scahill says that while Assange may not exactly be on the run to the extent that is being portrayed, diplomats have reason to be concerned about what Wikileaks may have in its possession. "I think a lot of diplomats around the world are very, very nervous. At a minimum, they're going to want to talk to Julian Assange," Scahill says. "He denies that he has them [the cables], by the way."

In addition to discussions of a potential secret prison and interrogation facility within the Bagram Air Base and the New York Times's coverage of Afghanistan's mineral wealth, Scahill and Flanders talk about Erik Prince and rumors that Blackwater, his controversial private military company, is for sale. "There are rum...

Dave Zirin: Why Does Glenn Beck Hate the World Cup?

Title: Dave Zirin: Why Does Glenn Beck Hate the World Cup?
Runtime: 2:20
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: "Beck rejects soccer because his idealized 'real America'—in all its monochromatic glory—rejects it as well." Dave Zirin, sports editor for The Nation, says that and a whole lot more in his commentary on why Glenn Beck—and the rest of the Right—hates World Cup soccer.

Katrina vanden Heuvel & Melissa Harris-Lacewell: The Year of the Woman?

Title: Katrina vanden Heuvel & Melissa Harris-Lacewell: The Year of the Woman?
Runtime: 11:22
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: The victories of Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman in California, Sharron Angle in Nevada, and Nikki Haley in South Carolina in last week's primaries are being hailed as a victory for women. Yet do conservative, anti-government women's candidacies spell gains for women nationwide? Or will the cuts they threaten to make to government programs hurt more women than their candidacies help?

To kick off our new Monday collaboration with The Nation magazine, we are joined in studio by editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel and columnist Melissa Harris-Lacewell, who break down the election results, the real history of these faux populists, and also report back on a Nation investigation in New Orleans that has led to indictments.

Mad as Hell: Confronting Wall Street's Class War

Title: Mad as Hell: Confronting Wall Street's Class War
Runtime: 3:49
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: Richard Kim, Senior Editor of The Nation magazine, and marchers from the April 29 march on Wall Street share their view of Wall Street's role in the financial crisis. For updates on the financial reform bill, go to www.thenation.com.

Title: The Nation's New Website
Runtime: 3:13
Date posted: 17 years ago
Description: TheNation.com has relaunched! Web editor Emily Douglas walks you through the new features and highlights. Learn how to make the best use of the new site!

TheNewsAccess.com™

The Nation

Follow us @TheNewsAccess

Subscribe via Email

FEATURED CHANNELS

US LOCAL

US NATIONAL

By Country

AFRICA

ASIA PACIFIC

AUSTRALIA+

EUROPE

INDIA

LATIN AMERICA

MIDDLE EAST

UNITED KINGDOM

CHANNELS

Subscribe via Email

Credits

TheNewsAccess.com™

The Nation

Share this:

Follow us @TheNewsAccess

Subscribe via Email

FEATURED CHANNELS

US LOCAL

US NATIONAL

By Country

AFRICA

ASIA PACIFIC

AUSTRALIA+

EUROPE

INDIA

LATIN AMERICA

MIDDLE EAST

UNITED KINGDOM

CHANNELS

Subscribe via Email

Credits