Talk Nation Radio: Mike Gravel on Why He’s Running for President

Mike Gravel is a former U.S. Senator who opposed the war on Vietnam and entered the Penatgon Papers into the Congressional Record. He has been an activist and advocate for democracy and peace for decades. He is a current candidate for U.S. President in the Democratic Party primaries. See mikegravel.org

Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.

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Syndicated read more

Vote for What?

Joshua Douglas’ new book, Vote for Us: How to Take Back Our Elections and Change the Future of Voting, does not explain when it was that we had our elections or what we can vote for other than “us,” but it does provide a great survey of election reform efforts, who’s working on them, and what’s working, with a list of organizations at the back that you can engage with.

While voter ID laws have spread, the racist stripping of names from polls goes unmentioned, threats and intimidation read more

Fallujah Forgotten

I don’t know if most people in the United States ever knew what Fallujah meant. It’s hard to believe the U.S. military would still exist if they did. But certainly it has been largely forgotten — a problem that could be remedied if everyone picks up a copy of The Sacking of Fallujah: A People’s History, by Ross Caputi (a U.S. veteran of one of the sieges of Fallujah), Richard Hill, and Donna Mulhearn.

“You’re welcome for the service!”

Fallujah was the “city of mosques,” made up read more

Exceptionally Innocent

Go right now and get yourself and the nearest house with a flag in front of it a copy of Roberto Sirvent’s and Danny Haiphong’s American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News — From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.

If this book had existed when I published Curing Exceptionalism, I would have said that reading it was part of the cure. The authors provide a rich survey and analysis of how people in the United States manage to believe themselves read more

Infotainment Is Taking Over

Entertainment misinforms. Humans cannot possibly survive into a distant future that includes light-speed travel while simultaneously behaving like feral animals. Torture doesn’t work. Politicians don’t resemble Martin Sheen. The poor little United States is not threatened by irrational evil empires. Violence won’t save us from masked storm troopers, evil wizards, or whomever Boeing and Lockheed Martin armed last year.

But at least we used to pretend there was a dividing line, back before read more

Closing Military Bases, Opening a New World

In a day and age when many of us are taught to overcome prejudice and behave respectfully toward all, mainstream U.S. media and school texts still habitually portray U.S. lives as the only lives that really matter. A plane crash that kills dozens of human beings is reported, just like a war, with the bulk of the coverage on the handful of U.S. lives lost. A U.S. military read more

Charlottesville Must Divest from Weapons and Fossil Fuels

The City of Charlottesville will be considering the question of divestment from weapons and fossil fuels at its meeting on May 6th.

For details on the divestment campaign, how to attend the meeting, and what else you can do to help in Charlottesville or in any other town, see http://divestcville.org

U.S. weapons companies arm three-quarters of the world’s dictatorships and both sides of numerous wars. Without the U.S. government’s support for fighters in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere, there read more

Charlottesville Is Keeping Trump’s Favorite Statues

Give a judge a couple of years and he’ll eventually blurt out that the sky is blue.

That’s now happened in Charlottesville, where a court has finally concluded that the statues of Lee and Jackson in their war uniforms on their war horses are war monuments.

People outside of Charlottesville will of course be scratching their heads and wondering what that matters. But that’s because nobody has bothered to tell them why Trump’s favorite statues are still standing and what it means.

The state read more

Does Washington D.C. Need a U.S. Embassy?

Here I am sleeping at the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington D.C. so that a coup government led by a graduate of George Washington University a few blocks from here doesn’t take the place over or send the U.S. Secret Service (and what the hell is secret about them?) to do it, and I keep wishing that the U.S. government could find the nerve to overthrow itself for a change.

The old joke is that the U.S. government is never overthrown because it’s in the one capital that doesn’t have a U.S. embassy. read more