bombings

Barack Obama spent his 49th birthday speaking to labor leaders at an AFL-CIO federation meeting, but GRITtv commentator Bill Fletcher, Jr. noted that Obama needs to do more than attend meetings--it's time for some action on the Employee Free Choice Act. In addition, Fletcher notes, Obama should be situating himself among working people, not just union higher-ups, against the "economic royalists" who would keep the economy's fundamental inequality. Fletcher joins us via Skype from Washington, D.C. to talk about Obama's ongoing struggle with obstructionism, and how no matter which party comes out of the 2010 elections, the working people need to keep pressing for what's theirs. There's struggles in the courts and there's struggles in the streets over the question of marriage equality. The National Organization for Marriage is running its "Summer of Marriage" tour across the country, "defending" the institution of marriage from those who think it should be open to ALL people. California's Courage Campaign has been following the tour, and in Indianapolis, they interviewed Larry Adams, who was holding a sign with two nooses drawn on it. They shared this video with us. "I conceived a film driven by fear and ended up with one grounded in faith," wrote Stephen Marshall of the process of making his documentary, Holy Wars.

This Monday, suicide bombings rocked two stations in the Moscow Metro, killing 39 people. This is only the latest in a series of attacks on Russian civilians, stemming from the conflict over the Russian occupation of Chechnya. Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, joins us to talk about the attacks, "Black Widow" suicide bombers, the tension between Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev, and how all of this affects U.S.-Russia relations. GRITtv with Laura Flanders brings participatory democracy onto your computer screen and into your living room, bridging the gap between audience and advocates. Watch any show, at any time: http://grittv.org Distributed by Tubemogul.

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.