katrina vanden heuvel

"We need to stay loudly and clearly that there is an alternative. The debate underway is suffocatingly narrow," says Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, of the way the conversation about jobs and the economy has become a conversation about spending and deficits. Meanwhile, she notes, outside of the Beltway, independent media and independent activists like US Uncut are fighting hard to change the conversation. Katrina joins Laura in studio to talk about what's needed to shift the conversation back to things that matter: jobs, good government, and putting the taxes where they belong. "There is a hunger out there for some kind of serious approach to the big issues of the day, and you have to be creative about it— that’s our job," says former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert of today's media landscape. Bob joined us in his first in-depth interview since leaving the New York Times in March of this year. After 20 years of working the at the Times' op-ed desk, Bob left for greener pastures--and a longer word-count. Bob is now working on a new book that will tackle, in depth, some of the issues that he covered in his nearly 20 years of working the "beat of left-out people". Bob joins us today to talk about his career as a journalist, why he left the Times, media, race, and more. Is there a journalism school somewhere that that teaches up-and-comers to put stories into little boxes? Laura has some thoughts on the connections that aren't being made in the news. Distributed by Tubemogul.

"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. Distributed by Tubemogul.

"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? Distributed by Tubemogul.

"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 Chris Hayes of The Nation, who joins Payne and Laura for a discussion of the campaign season thus far, and the potential for a little bit of money to go a long way in the right place. 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. Last week, The Nation uncovered evidence that Lou Dobbs, famed immigrant basher, had in fact employed undocumented immigrants on his estates. Dobbs' daughter is a championship equestrian, and Isabel Macdonald, the reporter for the magazine, spoke to several men who said they cared for horses owned by Dobbs while they were working in the country without authorization. Betsy Reed, executive editor of The Nation, stopped by the GRITtv studio to give us her thoughts on the controversy.