blowback
GRITtv: Nov. 22, 2010
"Average people must look at the screens and see the disconnect—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. She joins us, of course, here on GRITtv for our weekly partnership with The Nation magazine to bring you a different kind of political TV show.Katrina and Laura discuss 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.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 Laura in studio to discuss 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.Finally, this weekend saw the loss of two men who were important parts of the Nation family: anti-imperialist author and thinker Chalmers Johnson, and codebreaker and crossword puzzler supreme Frank W. Lewis. Laura has some words in remembrance.
Email this pageRemembering Chalmers Johnson and Frank W. Lewis
This weekend brought us two losses that will be felt throughout the Nation and GRITtv families. Distributed by Tubemogul.
GRITtv: Bissell Subcontracts Lousy Labor Practices
We've been talking about blowback on GRITtv today, and we can see the same patterns emerging in economic policy. In Illinois, not far from where the Republic Windows & Doors employees staged their successful factory occupation, warehouse workers for a subcontractor of Bissell, the vacuum cleaner manufacturer, are being fired and threatened after voting to form a union. Warehouse employee Monica Sanchez joins us along with Abraham Mwaura of Warehouse Workers for Justice and Mark Brenner of Labor Notes to tell the workers' side of the story.
GRITtv: Nov. 24, 2009
It's not only wars that produce blowback for the US; training and funding for right-leaning groups in Latin America has been a long-standing source of resentment and anger around the world. We look back at the effects of US intervention in Latin America and connect the patterns to the current situations in Afghanistan and Iraq with Christian Parenti, Nation contributor and author of "The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror," Rev. Luis Barrios, chair of the Department of Latin American & Latina/o Studies at John Jay College in New York.
