Culture and Society

Talk Nation Radio: Clinical Psychologist Bruce Levine Says U.S. Citizenry Particularly Inactive

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Clinical psychologist Bruce Levine says the U.S. public is particularly inactive.  Levine explains how we got this way, and how we might be cured.  Levine is the author of Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite.  He also contributed a chapter to The Military Industrial Complex at 50.  Levine’s website is http://brucelevine.net

Total run time: 29:00

Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Engineer: Christiane read more

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Talk Nation Radio: U.S. Poverty Is Expanding and Worsening

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Poverty in the United States is surrounded by myths and misunderstanding.  Poverty is expanding, and extreme poverty is expanding.  The social safety net is retracting.  Congress has just slashed food stamps.  But corporate media coverage that misleads us on the nature and causes of poverty is neither expanding nor improving.  Karen Dolan is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and coordinator of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.  She discusses this read more

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Should Military Use Our $$ to Sponsor NASCAR Teams?

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Is the ideal military recruit an independent thinker who refuses illegal orders, an obedient automaton who does anything he’s told, or a vicious sadist eager to rape and kill?  Is courage more important or strength? Does it make the slightest difference if a soldier is gay?

We can agree to disagree.  But most people are going to agree that the ideal recruit is not a drooling idiot who announces, “I want read more

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The Spread of Sacrifice Zones

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Chris Hedge’s and Joe Sacco’s new book, “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt,” is a treasure. Hedges wrote the plain text. Sacco produced the text-heavy cartoon sections and other illustrations, which even I — not a big fan of cartoon books — found to enrich this book enormously.

Hedges and Sacco visit Pine Ridge, South Dakota, to examine the misery of the Native Americans who remain there. It’s nice to think that we’ve corrected our crimes through read more

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Can We Get Along Without Authorities?

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Some years ago, I watched a screening of a film about Daniel Ellsberg and the release of the Pentagon Papers.  The film was shown in the U.S. Capitol, and Ellsberg was present, along with others, to discuss the movie and take questions afterwards. 

I’ve just read Chris Hayes’ new book “Twilight of the Elites,” and am reminded of the question that progressive blogger and then-Congressman Alan Grayson staffer Matt Stoller asked Ellsberg.

What, Stoller wanted to know, read more

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Bring on the Beautiful Trouble

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Now here’s a book that’s meant to be used: “Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution” edited by Andrew Boyd and Dave Oswald Mitchell.  The subtitle should be “Try this at home — but innovate!”  Instead it’s “From the people who brought you the Yes Men, Billionaires Against Bush, etc.”

Beautiful Trouble is a terrific addition to Gene Sharp’s catalog of nonviolent tactics, less read more

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Sibel Edmonds Finally Wins

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Sibel Edmonds’ new book, “Classified Woman,” is like an FBI file on the FBI, only without the incompetence.

The experiences she recounts resemble K.’s trip to the castle, as told by Franz Kafka, only without the pleasantness and humanity. 

I’ve read a million reviews of nonfiction books about our government that referred to them as “page-turners” and “gripping dramas,” but I had never read a book that actually fit that description until read more

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The Statues in Our Public Spaces Lie

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There are lies of omission as well as commission, and the statues in Charlottesville, Va. — typical of other towns — do both.  We have statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, a generic Confederate soldier, George Rogers Clark, Lewis and Clark (with Sacagawea kneeling like their dog), and on City Hall a triptych with Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.  We have a monument to the War on Vietnam.  And that’s it.

Here are some things not memorialized in any major statue read more

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Learning From La Venezuela

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Imagine that your son, your darling little boy, was killed during the past eight years in a war that served purely to kill a whole lot of Iraqis and enrich a small number of billionaires, while causing horrible environmental damage, stripping away our civil liberties, and poisoning foreign relations elsewhere.  And imagine that, instead of avoiding this reality or lying about it, you confronted it.  Further, imagine that you became so famous confronting it, that everybody wanted to be read more

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