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GRITtv: November 18, 2010
"You can't just have homeowners pay for the mess that the banks have made; not just of our finance system, it's becoming clear that they've made a mess of our private property system in this country," says Marcy Wheeler, who's been blogging the House and Senate hearings on the foreclosure crisis at her FireDogLake blog, and joins us via Skype to discuss the situation.And while hearings on Capitol Hill look into what the banks have done to everyday people, the discussion of Bush administration torture and unlawful detention goes on--Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was convicted of one of the 285 counts he was tried for, in a civilian court. Marcy points out that the trial might have gone differently if much of the evidence in the case hadn't been obtained through torture.We need to take control of the new computer networking tools all around us, argues author and thinker Douglas Rushkoff, or else we'll wind up at the mercy of those who do take control. That's part of the argument Rushkoff makes in his new book, Program or Be Programmed, out now from our friends at OR Books.With some basic computer and programming literacy, Rushkoff notes, we can take control of our lives, create value for ourselves, and perhaps let the big institutions that think they control us, from banks to media moguls, just wither away.Finally, one of those big institutions went "public" today--GM stock is back on the stock markets, the bankruptcy and bailouts apparently a success. But not so fast, say some, and Laura has some thoughts about who's really paying the price.
Email this pageGRITtv: The F Word: Profits, Pensions, and the Return of GM
Today marked the return of automaker GM to public trading on the stock market. All hail the American automakers, returning to profitability in a little over a year after bankruptcy proceedings and billions of government dollars in bailouts, right? Not so fast. Though the stock prices are expected to be high and papers have called it “historic,” let's not forget that bailout dollars and profits for shareholders come on the backs of union worker concessions, buyouts, and layoffs. And that's still not enough for some. Distributed by Tubemogul.
GRITtv: Fixing the Great Mistake: Autocentric Development
In this video from Street Films' new series, "Fixing the Great Mistake," Transportation Alternatives director Paul Steely White explains how New York's Park Avenue was changed to plan the city around cars, not people.
GRITtv: Mar. 1 2010
In Trevor Paglen's new book, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World, he investigates the "off the map" locations of covert government activity, including the "salt pit" in Kabul where Khaled El-Masri was held.
Ben Wizner, from the ACLU's National Security Project, is El-Masri's lawyer and he joins Paglen in studio with Laura to talk about black sites, government secrecy, and why anything goes when prisoners are taken off the map.
In today's video from Street Films' new series, "Fixing the Great Mistake," Transportation Alternatives director Paul Steely White explains how New York's Park Avenue was changed to plan the city around cars, not people.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that executing people judged "mentally retarded" qualified as cruel and unusual punishment, and thus unconstitutional. Yet for this ruling to apply, prisoners must be evaluated properly and fairly by professionals, whose medical opinion is unbiased.
Multimedia investigative journalist Renee Feltz found several cases in Texas where inmates were kept on death row--and in some cases executed--despite clear evidence that they suffered the kind of mental disability that the Court described. She joins Laura in studio to share some of her video from her investigation and explain why states are still managing to execute the mentally challenged.
The Real News Network reports on protests in the occupied Palestinian city of Hebron. After Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a new Israeli "heritage" plan, which classifies national and holy sites in Israel and the occupied territories as Israeli "heritage."
From our friends at Tactical Technology Collective, this third clip in the series explains how visual representations of information and data can broaden the reach of information activism across language barriers.
