Political Ideas

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: Chip Gibbons on Anti-Russia Committee and Censoring Criticism of Israel

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https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/talk-nation-radio-chip-gibbons-on-anti-russia-committee-and-censoring-criticism-of-israel

Chip Gibbons is the Policy and Legislative Counsel for the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. He is also a writer whose work has been featured in Jacobin, Truthout, and Counterpunch. We discuss U.S. Congressional efforts to censor criticism of the Israeli government, and to create a new McCarthyite Anti-Russia Committee.

The petition we mention is here.

The account of a sleeping read more

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Give Wes Bellamy a Break

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Charlottesville City Council Member Wes Bellamy is being widely denounced for tweets he tweeted years ago. I think he should be given a break.

I don’t know Bellamy well and have not communicated with him about this. I don’t support everything he’s done even in recent years. I have almost nothing but contempt for the Democratic Party. I don’t believe Bellamy deserves more of a break than would anyone else from some other demographic. I don’t sympathize in the least 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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Millennials Organize Gun Violence Prevention Intersectionality Summit

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Millennials Organize Gun Violence Prevention Intersectionality Summit to Bring People Together Post-Election to Combat Divisiveness and Hate for a Day of Education, Organizing, Solidarity, and Art

Strength in Synergy Summit to be help December 10th at American University, DC

WASHINGTON, DC – On Saturday, December 10 from 9:30am – 7:30pm, a gun violence prevention summit organized by millennials will hold workshops, panel discussions, breakout grassroots organizing sessions, and conclude read more

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Dear Mr. Trump, About Your 29 Ideas

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Regarding your 29 proposals, here’s a bit more than just the ranking you asked for. I’ll start with the best:

7. Announce our official withdrawal from the TPP.

That’s my favorite. Wonderful! We don’t need any more trade agreements that empower corporations over governments and impose unpopular laws on people. Good riddance! Don’t replace it with something worse, please!

8. Renegotiate NAFTA into terms that protect the American worker.

This could be a great one. I’m read more

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Calexit Yes

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California should secede from the United States, kick out the U.S. military, withhold all its U.S. taxes, invest in its infrastructure and educational systems, lead the world in sustainable energy, welcome refugees and immigrants, join the International Criminal Court, join and push for the democratization of the United Nations, sign onto the Convention on the Rights of the Child, join the world in banning land mines and cluster bombs and depleted uranium and nuclear weapons and racial discrimination read more

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Of Veterans and Black Mirror Roaches

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If you’re a fan of the Netflix show Black Mirror, go watch the episode called “Men Against Fire” before reading this. It’s the one about war.

In this 60-minute science fiction show, soldiers have been (somehow) programed so that when they look at certain people they see them as freaky monsters with pointed teeth and bizarre faces. These people look frightening and non-human. They are thought of as objects, not as people at all. In reality they are themselves terrified, unarmed, read more

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Disobey or Die

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Back in the winter of 1982, Air Florida flight 90 took off from National Airport. The first officer noticed dangerous readings on some instruments and pointed them out to the captain. The captain told him he was wrong, and he accepted the captain’s authority. He did nothing. Thirty seconds later the plane crashed into the 14th Street Bridge. Everyone on board died except for four passengers rescued out of the icy river.

During the latter decades of the 20th and first part of the 21st century, read more

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Talk Nation Radio: Timeka Drew on Protecting Voter Rights

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https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/talk-nation-radio-timeka-drew-on-protecting-voter-rights

Timeka Drew is National Director of the Liberty Tree Foundation, a position she has served in since February of 2016. Previously she served as Liberty Tree’s Communications Director and worked as lead organizer of the Global Climate Convergence. Timeka came to the Liberty Tree community via her work with the Poor People’s Economic Human read more

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What Hillary Clinton Privately Told Goldman Sachs

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At first glance, Hillary Clinton’s speeches to Goldman Sachs, which she refused to show us but WikiLeaks claims to have now produced the texts of, reveal less blatant hypocrisy or abuse than do the texts of various emails also recently revealed. But take a closer look.

Clinton has famously said that she believes in maintaining a public position on each issue that differs from her private position. Which did she provide to Goldman Sachs?

Yes, Clinton does profess her loyalty to corporate trade read more

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Acting on Bill Ayers' Radical Manifesto

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Bill Ayers’ short new book, Demand the Impossible: A Radical Manifesto, is different from the typical liberal view of a better world in two ways. First, its goals are a bit grander, more inspiring. Second, it adds as the first and most important goal one that others don’t include at all.

A typical proposal that a lesser evilist might give for “voting against Donald Trump” might include minor economic or police or prison reforms, a bit of environmentalism, healthcare, or read more

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Suing Saudi: Congress Is Right, Stephen Kinzer Is Wrong

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Now there you have two things that I never expected to write. How often is Congress right about anything or Stephen Kinzer wrong? Congress wants 9/11 victims’ families to be able to sue Saudi Arabia for its role in those crimes. Kinzer does not.

It’s not that he doesn’t care about victims’ families. It’s not that he’s worried about disturbing relations with the Saudi monarchy (which could perhaps stop selling the United States the fossilized poison it uses to read more

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Talk Nation Radio: Elizabeth Murray and John Kiriakou on Working in a Corrupt Government and Whistleblowing

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https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/tnr-elizabeth-murray-and-john-kiriakou-on-working-in-a-corrupt-government-and-whistleblowing

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer, who in 2007 became the first U.S. Government official to publicly confirm and describe CIA use of waterboarding on al-Qaeda prisoners, which he described as torture. In January 2013, Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in prison and was released after serving more than 23 months. Since then, he read more

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Snowden: Best Film of the Year

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Snowden is the most entertaining, informing, and important film you are likely to see this year.

It’s the true story of an awakening. It traces the path of Edward Snowden’s career in the U.S. military, the CIA, the NSA, and at various contractors thereof. It also traces the path of Edward Snowden’s agonizingly slow awakening to the possibility that the U.S. government might sometimes be wrong, corrupt, or criminal. And of course the film takes us through Snowden’s courageous read more

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Protests of National Anthem Restore My Faith in Humanity

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Speaking out against racism is one thing — and a wonderful and admirable thing it is — but choosing to do so by sitting out the U.S. national anthem, and then having others join in, or “come out” as routine national anthem sitters: this is fantastic!

A self-governing republic of thinking people (whose first thought should be “My god, what are we doing to the rest of the planet with all this pollution and all these wars?”) ought to have no use for mandatory flag read more

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Worst Human Being Alive: Tony Blair?

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I realize that, living here in the United States, the nation doing the most in the world to create wars, proliferate nukes, and destroy the habitability of the earth’s climate, I really have a duty to pick someone in the United States as the worst individual human being alive.

But the United States operates by incestuous swarm. We have another Cheney running for Congress and another Clinton running for president. We have Trump’s campaign manager in trouble for taking money from Russians, read more

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It's Not the Economy, Stupid

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The last time a Clinton tried to get into the White House, his campaign motto was “It’s the economy, stupid!”

If you engage with peace organizations, you will very quickly be told repeatedly that nobody gives a damn about distant mass murder, and that consequently a smart organizer will talk to them about something local, such as the local impact of the financial burden of war, or perhaps the militarization of the police, or local recruitment, or local environmental damage from read more

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