Public Policy

Talk Nation Radio: Brian Cannon on Undoing Gerrymandering in Virginia and the U.S.

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This week on Talk Nation Radio: Undoing Gerrymandering. Our guest is Brian Cannon, executive director of FairMapsVA — that’s VA for Virginia — the website is http://fairmapsva.org

The organization is working on the Vote Yes campaign for a redistricting reform amendment.  Before leaving to run the vote yes campaign, Brian was Executive Director of OneVirginia2021, which raised the issue of ending gerrymandering in Virginia. While in law school, Brian studied election law and was on read more

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Talk Nation Radio: Lindsay Koshgarian on How-Ya-Gonna-Pay-For-It

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Lindsay Koshgarian is the Program Director of the National Priorities Project, where she oversees NationalPriorities.org. Lindsay’s work on the federal budget includes analysis of the federal budget process and politics, military spending, and specifically how federal budget choices for different spending priorities and taxation interact.

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

Download from LetsTryDemocracy, or from Internet Archive.

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Talk Nation Radio: Ahmet Tonak on a 2500% increase in worker exploitation

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E. Ahmet Tonak is the author and editor of several books including Measuring the Wealth of Nations: The Political Economy of National Accounts (with Anwar Shaikh), Turkey in Transition: New Perspectives (edited with Irvin Schick) and Marxism and Classes (edited with Sungur Savran and Kurtar Tanyılmaz). Trained as a mechanical engineer at Istanbul Technical University, he earned a Ph.D. in economics from the New School for Social Research. Tonak taught for many years read more

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Talk Nation Radio: Nicolas Davies on War Profiteers

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Nicolas J. S. Davies writes about U.S. foreign policy, war and militarism for Consortium News and other outlets. He has been working as a researcher with CODEPINK, and co-authored its report on “War Profiteers: the U.S. War Machine and the Arming of Repressive Regimes.” He is also the author of the excellent book, Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

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

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Transcript: David Swanson and George Monbiot

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Talk Nation Radio: George Monbiot on a New Politics

Tuesday, 9/18/2018

David Swanson: It is my great privilege to welcome to Talk Nation Radio this week, George Monbiot, who is an author, columnist for the Guardian newspaper, and environmental campaigner. Among his books and projects, Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea, and Human Live, The Age of Consent, Heat: How to Keep the Planet From Burning, and the concept album, Breaking the Spell of Loneliness. He has made a number read more

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Talk Nation Radio: Sarah Williams Goldhagen on How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives

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Sarah Williams Goldhagen is a contributing editor at Architectural Record and served as the Architecture Critic of The New Republic from 2005-2013. Her articles have also appeared in The New York Times, The American Prospect, and Art In America, and she has contributed scholarly essays to many publications, including Assemblage, The Harvard Design Magazine, and The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Goldhagen’s new book read more

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Jim Paul on the UN Security Council as a Tool of U.S. Domination

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Jim Paul for 19 years was the executive director of Global Policy Forum and was chair of the NGO working group on the UN Security Council. He is the author of the just-released book Of Foxes and Chickens: Oligarchy and Global Power in the UN Security Council.

The book is available free in English or German:
http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/of-foxes-and-chickens

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

Download from LetsTryDemocracy or Archive.

Pacifica read more

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Talk Nation Radio: Silvio Carrillo on U.S. Support for Coup and Stolen Election in Honduras

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Silvio Carrillo is an Oakland-based freelance multimedia journalist, director of the website BertaCaceres.org and nephew of Berta Cáceres, a Honduran activist who was assassinated there in March 2016 after being awarded the Goldman Prize for her environmental activism. Carrillo just wrote the New York Times op-ed “America’s Blind Eye to Honduras’s Tyrant.”

He can be found at Twitter.com/JusticeforBerta or Facebook.com/justiceforberta

Help pass the Berta Caceres Act.

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Charlottesville’s Past That Isn’t Even

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Here in Charlottesville, Virginia, I like to point out that the rallies of racists are mostly imported from out of state. It’s tempting to relax comfortably on that assertion, and to reflect on how our great lord and master Thomas Jefferson owned people with more reluctance and inner turmoil than Barack Obama bombing a foreign country or Donald Trump mouthing kind or coherent phrases from a teleprompter.

Reality is a little more troubling. Jefferson was a vicious and heartless profiteer and read more

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Trump’s Articles of Impeachment: A Greatest Hits Collection

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By David Swanson, FireDonaldTrump.org

Some say the world will end in Trump,
Some say in Pence.
From what I’ve heard out on the stump,
I hold with those who favor Trump;
For if he’s stopped they both might be.
If not, the chance may come too late
For Mr. Pence the throne to capture
And make our fate
His longed-for rapture.

Several years back, I led a team of authors drafting articles of impeachment against then-President George W. Bush for then-Congressman Dennis Kucinich. We drafted read more

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Talk Nation Radio: Jay James on an alternative to prison for addicts

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https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/talk-nation-radio-jay-james-on-an-alternative-to-prison-for-addicts

Jay James is the assistant director of Bridge Ministry. We discuss an alternative to incarceration.   See http://www.bridgeministry.info   Total run time: 29:00

Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.

Download from LetsTryDemocracy or Archive.

Pacifica stations can also download from Audioport.

Syndicated by Pacifica Network.

Please encourage your local radio stations to carry this program every week!

Please embed the SoundCloud audio on your own website!

Past read more

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Talk Nation Radio: Tressie McMillan Cottom on For-Profit Colleges and the Society That Produces Them

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https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/talk-nation-radio-tressie-mcmillan-cottom-on-for-profit-colleges-and-the-society-that-produces-them

Tressie McMillan Cottom is the author of Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy. We discuss her book.

See:
http://thenewpress.com/books/lower-ed

Total run time: 29:00

Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.

Download from LetsTryDemocracy or Archive.

Pacifica stations can also download from Audioport.

read more

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Talk Nation Radio: John Burroughs on Using Law Against Climate and Nuclear Dangers

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https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/talk-nation-radio-john-burroughs-on-using-law-against-climate-and-nuclear-dangers

John Burroughs is Executive Director, Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy (www.lcnp.org), based in New York City. He represents LCNP in Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review proceedings, the United Nations, and other international forums. He was a member of the Marshall Islands international legal team read more

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Talk Nation Radio: U.S. Mass Incarceration, Police Militarization, and Crimes Against Palestinians

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https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/talk-nation-radio-us-mass-incarceration-police-militarization-and-crimes-against-palestinians

Two guests this week: Jeff Fogel and Ntebo Mokuena.

Jeff Fogel is a candidate for Commonwealth’s Attorney here in Charlottesville, Virginia. After graduating from Rutgers School of Law in 1969, Jeff received a fellowship to work providing legal services to indigent residents in Newark, New Jersey.  After several years, he left that read more

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Yes, Positivity, Pangloss, Partisanship, Propaganda, and Populism

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Eight years ago Yes! Magazine published a political platform of progressive policies, along with polling showing strong majority support for each proposal. Now, eight years later, we can show almost total failure to advance any of the proposals, most of which were focused on the U.S. federal government.

Where there have been any small successes, they have mostly come at the state or local level or outside the United States. New York State just took a step toward free college and Washington State read more

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Talk Nation Radio: Vincent Emanuele on Wars for Oil Companies; Robert Alvarez on Department of Energy for Nuclear Weapons

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https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/talk-nation-radio-vincent-emanuele-on-wars-for-oil-robert-alvarez-on-dept-of-energy-for-nukes

Vincent Emanuele joined the United States Marine Corps as a squad automatic machine gunner in 2002. After two combat-deployments in Iraq, he refused orders for a third and immediately began organizing with Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War.

In 2008, Vince testified to Congress at the Winter Soldier Hearings on Capitol Hill, where he provided detailed read more

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Black and Foreign Lives Matter: Ending Gun Violence Requires Ending War

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Happy Human Rights Day, and what ever happened to the right to life?

We need to stop imagining that when wars come home to the land of their creators that the suffering created is something separate from war. And we need to stop imagining that racist cruelty at home doesn’t fuel the distant wars.

Imagine a country in which people condemn gun violence and police violence while actively pushing for a new cold war with Russia or urging the bombing of Syria or cheering a string of drone murders read more

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Virginia's Constitution Needs Improving

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Virginia’s Constitution is three times as long as the U.S. Constitution (which is notably lacking any serious sections on oyster beds). Virginia’s Constitution has also been updated at least three times as much as the U.S. Constitution. But it is now long overdue.

The U.S. Constitution has been updated with 27 amendments and 0 serious revisions through conventions. Virginia’s Constitution has been amended many times including through five Constitutional conventions, held in 1830, read more

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Talk Nation Radio: George Lakey on Viking Economics

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https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/talk-nation-radio-george-lakey-on-viking-economics

George Lakey recently retired from Swarthmore College where he was Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor for Issues in Social Change and managed the Global Nonviolent Action Database research project. His first arrest was for a civil rights sit-in. He has served as an unarmed bodyguard for human rights defenders in Sri Lanka. Lakey read more

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Born on Home Plate

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Remember the satirical “Billionaires for Bush” protesters? Around this time in 2008 I asked them to become Oligarchs for Obama, and they refused. But I predict Tycoons for Trump will be born this month. Inequality, like war and climate destruction, has its face now.

Chuck Collins’ book, Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good, presents the problem of inequality as well as any I’ve read more

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