 This is George Kenney's idiosyncratic political commentary, including also social commentary, religious commentary, arts commentary, news links, interviews, original reporting and whatever else he finds interesting. Think of it as a miniature, alternative NPR.Primary Format :
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Six Questions for Senator Abourezk
For your summertime listening edification, here's a quick interview with former U.S. Senator James G. Abourezk, recorded yesterday. An "in-between" podcast, between EP's regular Friday shows. Please note, in particular, the Senator's experience in trying to organize progressives and his observations regarding current efforts — or the lack thereof. It was very kind of Senator Abourezk to take time to talk with me and I'm grateful to him for his honest answers. Total runtime twenty thr ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Art of Implementation
With a will, we can manage our environmental and energy crises. But it's policy that's too important to leave to politicians, policy-makers, and the market: a large part of the intelligent public must demand that the right things be done. To get a sense of what's possible here in the U.S. I turned to Terry Tamminen, formerly the Secretary of California's EPA and a top adviser to Governor Schwarzenegger. Terry provides a splendid, thoughtful and surprisingly optimistic tour d'horizon. The v ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Modeling Planetary Dynamics
One could attach different numbers to the curves in Limits To Growth, maybe push the timeline back several decades, but one can't argue much with the heuristic conclusion that unrestricted exponential growth results in sudden collapse. If we won't make the hard choices to control growth (e.g., population and industrialization), nature will. To get a better sense of how planetary dynamics works and what policy changes might be available I turned to the very distinguished scholar Dr. Dennis ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Not the American Way
For over two hundred years any notion that the United States government might officially practice torture was unthinkable, ridiculous. Under George Bush's tyranny, what have we become? Even if Congress has no stomach for a serious investigation, the thinking public must never let culpable officials off the hook. Zero tolerance for torture: it's the only civilized approach. For a sense of how a seasoned British lawyer sees the situation I turned to Philippe Sands, author of the superb, rece ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Gangs of Pentagon Procurement
Politicians practically worship the Pentagon because it carefully, cleverly directs its gargantuan spending across almost every congressional district. And because contractors kick back a hefty tranche to politicians' bank accounts. Not so much of this supports the public good or authentic "defense." Call it the dark side of Keynesianism. Our ruinous military money conveyor can't go on indefinitely but most politicians won't discuss it or give reform the priority it deserves. And the mains ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
It's not "Defense" Spending
One fact should be tacked on to all discussions of policy priorities: the U.S. spends over half a trillion dollars on its military, more than the rest of the world's military spending combined. To be blunt, that's insane. And it explains why the U.S. lags so far behind other advanced countries when it comes to social programs, public infrastructure, and generally every progressive metric that can be measured. There's no money left. To get at the cultural history behind our prohibitively ex ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Apartheid: For or Against??
The U.S. pays for and protects a system of Apartheid in Israel. The U.S. government routinely lies about this, describing Israel as a "Democracy." Worse, the U.S. encourages Israeli Jews to keep those Palestinians who live in Gaza and the West Bank in a sort of outdoor prison-cum-shooting gallery. Absolutely contrary to what many of the Left have argued, seemingly forever, Jews are the ones calling the shots. It's the most odious, obscene abuse of human beings in the world — precisel ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Millennial Politics
Nobody knows for sure, but it looks like a very strong turn out in 2008 by the young and by African-Americans may well be what puts the Democrats over the top. The young — the Millennial generation — in particular are something of a mystery. Larger than the Baby Boom generation, ethnically much more mixed, and (unlike generation "X") politically active, for a variety of reasons the Millennials strongly tend towards progressive policy solutions. Will this last? For some answers ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Art of Pragmatic Policy Making
It's a pity when domestic politics trumps rational foreign policy in the national interest. Should we talk with Hamas, even Hezbollah? Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff, says yes. Should we talk with Cuba? Emphatically yes, says Larry. And why? Because the fact is, most of the time we get more of what we want by talking with people than by periodically bashing them with military power, or by ignoring them while the rest of the world maintains normal relations. Here's a ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
"Mankind Must Put An End To War..."
"...or war will put an end to mankind." (JFK in a September 25, 1961 speech to the UN General Assembly.) A lot of people, these days, understand that the risks of nuclear war are too great. But what are those risks, exactly? As it turns out, nobody knows, and until now nobody's tried to figure them out. Dr. Martin E. Hellman — not for the first time — spotted the obvious that everybody else missed. His new project, Defusing the Nuclear Threat, starts by proposing a serious, urg ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Art of Faith
Follow what you know how to do well. Frank Schaeffer's memoir, Crazy for God, offers an unexpected mirror into the American experience. From being one of the brains behind the founding of the evangelical political right, to his stalwart, enthusiastic support for Obama today (we talk about Obama a lot), Frank's trajectory has taken him through various stations of faith. Strong character having been bred into him, he's managed eventually to come to terms with it all. A great example of perso ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Wild Horses Flying
Horses have always been with us. At Lascaux. On the Ural steppes. Among the Sumerians, the Scythians, the Chinese… It's not much of an exaggeration to say that the domestication of the horse made civilization possible. And here's a little known fact: horses evolved in North America, were wiped out by the ice age about 8,000 years ago, but not before they crossed the Bering land bridge and spread throughout the rest of the world. When the Spanish reintroduced horses to the New World, ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Of Tongues and Ticking Time Bombs
Governments always insist on keeping their practice of torture secret — as well they should, because torture almost never works. And, in fact, it generally has profoundly negative, unintended, practical consequences. While we intuit that torture is wrong, we only know of its futility thanks to a few intrepid researchers who patiently sift the archives. For a sample of what can be known I turned to Dr. Darius Rejali, author most recently of the encyclopedic (and aptly titled) Torture ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Art of Energy Politics
To Peak Oil aficionados (I'm including me here) it may be something of a surprise to learn that not all is doom and gloom, that the catastrophic collapse of civilization as we know it is neither imminent nor inevitable. In fact, we have an amazing, working, macro-scale example of emergent energy independence — right now — in Germany. To get the inside scoop I turned to Dr. Hermann Scheer, a member of the German parliament (Bundestag), and driving force behind German energy inno ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Basic Right to Health Care
By most measures the U.S. has one of the worst health care systems (and most expensive) of any advanced country in the world. Why is that? To try to make some sense of the politics of health care I turned to Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program. Thank you, Steffie, for your great determination and leadership! Clearly, a lot of doctors are fed up with their patients (read, clients) being corporations instead of real people. And I think most America ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Pricing the Elixir of Life
Few people know as much about the water situation in the U.S. as Dr. Robert J. Glennon. Though I'd take a different tack than he would in knocking heads together I think he's proposed innovative, workable, "market-ish" based ways to rationalize water usage. And I completely agree with him that the problem is how to prevent a crisis from becoming a catastrophe. Total runtime an hour and three minutes. Comments welcome!Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Bleeding The Hyperpower Dry
Among available options, "victory" in Iraq doesn't exist. For an army of occupation perhaps it never did. The smart thing would be to get out as fast as practicably possible — sadly, that doesn't seem to be in the cards. Policy preferences aside, nevertheless, it's helpful to try to understand the political-military dynamic. For that I turned once again to Wayne White, a top middle east analyst, formerly with the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. This is his thi ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Who Is My Neighbor?
For decades the Republican Party has used fear to drive religious voters away from the Democrats. The Republicans succeeded so spectacularly that much of the Democratic Party establishment got conditioned to automatically — and wrongly — write off Evangelicals. It's a big part of the reason why Democrats lose elections. To get some perspective on religion in politics I turned to Amy Sullivan, the nation editor at Time magazine and author of The Party Faithful: How and Why Democ ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Skimbleshanks
Of all the books on 9/11 Peter Dale Scott's learned The Road To 9/11(University of California Press, 2007) deserves special recognition for situating the events of 9/11 in an intelligible, albeit complicated, context. Unlike other leftist social critics who see a simple narrative in government actions, Peter sees rich textures in what he calls 'the deep state.' An agnostic about what actually happened on 9/11 Peter nevertheless convincingly and powerfully argues that everything is not as i ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Organic Agriculture Movement
Organic food tastes better. It's healthier. It costs a bit more, but surveys show that, counterintuitively, it isn't consumed disproportionately by the affluent. And the most remarkable thing: organic food is increasing its market share relatively quickly. To learn about the current state of the organic agriculture movement and what accounts for its success I turned to Dr. Brian Obach, a committed organic consumer who's been trying to explain social movements for twenty years. As an organi ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Neptune's Cornucopia
Some mistakes you don't get to "do-over." Wiping out a unique fish, the Menhaden, the keystone species of America's Atlantic and Gulf fisheries, amounts to ecocide. And a peculiarly foolish mistake, too — nothing great accrues to any of the grubby perpetrators, or their equally grubby political enablers. Devastation only provides literally chicken-feed to a few. Dr. H. Bruce Franklin, an eminent literary expert and historian of American culture, tells this fish story in an unforgetta ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
A Vulture's Bonanza
Protectionism can be a good thing. Protectionism, in fact, is the only way that a developing country can become developed. And, I daresay, it's the only way an industrial country like the U.S. can retain its industrial base and high standard of living in the face of wage arbitrage by large corporations that offshore their operations. Moreover, if, as Dr. Ha-Joon Chang argues, a rational high culture results from industrialization (and not the opposite, as is often wrongly — and racia ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
War Mongers
Following my conversation about the Israel Lobby with John Mearsheimer in early January, I thought it would be helpful to take a more detailed look at the neo-cons. So I turned to Jim Lobe, Washington Bureau Chief of the Inter Press Service news agency, a recognized expert on the subject who knows probably almost as much about the neo-cons as they do themselves. Jim explains in a very straight-forward and thoughtful way how the neo-con godlings (my term) are out to create perpetual war. It ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Kosovo Options
According to many (usually) reliable sources, this weekend the Albanian majority in the Serbian province of Kosovo will, with tacit U.S. support, unilaterally declare independence. If not this weekend, then soon enough. Though unlikely to spark a new, full-blown round of Yugoslavia's civil war — made dormant by the Dayton agreement in 1995 — Kosovo's putative independence creates as many problems as it solves, or more. To get a sense of what's at stake and what sorts of logical ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Ghost Wars
International terrorists should be subject to normal police procedure and normal judicial trials. Disappearing people into an international gulag isn't any kind of a serious policy — indeed, it's merely terrorism of another sort. To understand a bit more about how our approach to terrorism could be so badly misguided I turned to Stephen Grey, an independent UK journalist and author most recently of Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Rendition and Torture Program. Stephen has also ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Whither Pakistan?
There aren't many experts on Pakistan's nuclear program, or in particular on its command and control systems. And fewer still who are also sensibly articulate about Pakistani politics. We're fortunate to have Dr. Shaun Gregory, Director of the Pakistan Security Research Unit at the University of Bradford, to explain things. No doubt about it: Pakistan has turned into a fine mess — it'll require sustained intelligent attention to recover safely but even so, outside help doesn't guaran ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Green Grievances
Most Americans want policies neither party has offered them: an end to the occupation of Iraq; return to the rule of law and constitutional protections; workable health care; decent paying jobs; a clean and safe environment; energy security — in short, the replacement of monied special interests by public spirited actors. Internationally, similar preferences have translated into electoral success for Green parties. Here in the U.S., not so much. Why not? According to John Murphy, a G ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Scala Naturæ
Consider this: The human neocortical surface covers 2,275 cm2, about the size of a dinner napkin, but the common dolphin neocortical surface covers 3,745 cm2, bigger than an unfolded newspaper. Making a very rough adjustment for mass, humans have a "gyrification index" of 1.75; dolphins run up to 2.7, killer whales even higher. In terms of brain to body size our highly evolved human brains are slightly larger and have a larger absolute number of neurons, while cetacean brains have more gli ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Six Questions for Charlie Peters
What a treat to talk with Charlie Peters, founding editor of the Washington Monthly! Charlie's imaginative common sense should be on your 'must read' list — at least occasionally from an issue off the newsstand even if you don't subscribe. And it's tough to figure Charlie's influence except that it's considerable among Washington literati. So here are his answers to the best six questions I could think of. Total runtime 25:32. Enjoy!Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Speaking Truth To Power
The Israel Lobby inflicts such significant damage to U.S. national security interests that one book could not possibly be enough for a detailed discussion. Hopefully, others will follow the courageous example set by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, bringing new ideas about how to measure the Lobby's influence, how to ask the right questions about what should be done to protect the integrity of the U.S. foreign policy process, and why thinking about the problem in moral terms sugges ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Money, Money, Money
With the global economy teetering on a precipice, I wanted to get the view from London as to our prospects. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the International Business Editor for the Telegraph, brings to the situation an incredibly well-informed, extremely intelligent, moderately conservative perspective. He makes fair points — putting a positive analysis to work, where possible. Yet even Ambrose has hair-raising things to say about the financial markets, some of which you may not have heard ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Digital Breadcrumbs
Until just a few years ago researchers into psi phenomena were not much better off than interested scholars of a hundred or even a thousand years ago. What's changed is not so much the use of scientific method — though that's a necessary part of it — but the advent of cheap, powerful computers adaptable to all manner of experimental tasks. Perhaps ironic (in a good sense) that inorganic machines may help us understand more about the fundamentals of the energy of consciousness t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Who Knew?
It's an enormous conceit to think that population increases are everywhere and always a good thing. In the blessed tradition, however, of neo-classical economic theory (aka 'free markets') such is the miracle of rational choice that left to themselves people will 'optimize' the rate of population growth: no natural limit on population exists. Nevertheless, in reality the unacknowledged costs of population growth mostly shift to future generations. Call it the ultimate Ponzi scheme. And if ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Kurds'Story
In trying to untangle the strands of modern "humanitarian interventionism"one could do worse than by starting with the implementation genius Fred Cuny. Apposite events, of course, go back to Biafra (as did Fred) and earlier, but the real turning point came with Fred's repatriation of Iraqi Kurds after the first Gulf War. Afterwards, the military and many/most aid organizations entered something of a consensual relationship; those who cut their teeth on the Kurds would later play key roles ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Angels of Our Better Nature
Put in the wrong situation, with the wrong incentives, it's pretty hard to do the right thing. But we can learn to think about things in all kinds of new and different ways (including learning from our mistakes), so why not learn to think, and act, heroically? Phil Zimbardo, one of America's most distinguished psychologists, reflects back on over three decades of experience and finds some fundamental lessons in the dungeons at Abu Ghraib. His book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Goo ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Right To Vote
Most people figure the Constitution gives us the right to vote. They would be wrong. As Garrett Epps tells us, not only does the Constitution not define a right to vote, but for that very reason Supreme Court decisions talk about "the right to vote" in quotation marks. Which leads, naturally, to the question of what else we're assuming is there, in fact, isn't? In short, the Constitution is a seriously incomplete blueprint — our job is to make sense of it and, where necessary, build ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
What Is Torture?
"Give me Liberty or give me Death." To put this famous saying attributed to Patrick Henry somewhat differently, we easily recognize that death is not the worst thing that can happen to us. Indeed, there seems a large class of worse circumstances, though we generally don't categorize them or, perhaps more importantly, often lack adequate language to describe them. Worse than death: it's a subtle difference that doesn't lend itself to formulation in terms of rules. Perhaps that's why, when w ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The View From Cleveland
At one point in this conversation Betsy Sullivan, editorial board member and columnist at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, says she may be naïve but that she believes in absolute truth in politics. Amen. We should all be so naïve. People on the coasts often make fun of the mid-west's lack of sophistication but surprisingly often it demonstrates more highly developed sensibilities. To my mind, believing in truth in politics is a quintessential mid-western idea. The sort of stuff, indee ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Post Apocalypsis
Supposing it were the end of the world, the revelation due should be tapping, tapping at the door (to mix literary metaphors). And if you think about it, that makes perfect sense. Our political system doesn't work well anymore, if at all, but perhaps we're not really doomed since we're capable of thinking up something new. At least, that's the message I take from the artist Robert Shetterly's project, Americans Who Tell The Truth. Robert is pursuing a unique kind of grass-roots progressive ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Lodestar
Every once in a while somebody comes along with whom you can agree about most things — Samuel Clemens, Joan Didion, Gore Vidal... People with a capacity for unusually deep insight. I suspect that in important ways this gift can't be learned, although we can learn to appreciate it. Linda McQuaig is another who sees past the actual to what's possible, and she's got the tenacity and convivial personality to be able to present these ideas to an extremely wide audience. Author most recent ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Faith Based Intelligence
Valerie Plame, author of Fair Game, is the sort of person I'd feel safe going to if I were in a lot of trouble. And she's proof of two things: That the U.S. government bureaucracy can be and has been staffed by highly competent professionals, but that today a perverse, politicized 'de-professionalization' is in full bloom. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense: professionals are going to be loyal to the Constitution, to their professional code, and to each another. So who are you g ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Art of Counter-Terrorism
As Larry Johnson says, we can't afford to pretend that terrorism doesn't exist, but neither can we win a war against it or contain it through superior technology. Terrorism, essentially, is an international police problem that should be managed through traditional law enforcement tools together with a bit of shoe-leather espionage and greater sensitivity to its cultural and political context. If we think we can stomp on the Islamic world until we've eradicated terrorism, we've got another ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Who Killed Habeas?
"I" said the Meadowlark, "In my prison in the dark, I killed Habeas." Dating back over 700 years in the English speaking world, the notion that the custodian of a prisoner must justify their detention before a court lays the foundation for individual liberty. Without habeas corpus the state becomes all-powerful, whether that power be fully exercised, or not. To better understand what's happening in the so-called "war on terror," and where things are headed, I turned to Joseph Margulies, la ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Milgram World
In the 18th century elites predominated among the politically active. So it was natural for the founding fathers to worry mainly about faction while blissfully overlooking fanaticism or the problems of followership. Given the 20th century experience with authoritarian rule one wonders, however, whether contemporary government structures or ideas about democracy suffice. Clearly, for exactly the wrong reasons, the Cheney-Bush administration thinks not. We really must get into the details of ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Public Service Podcast
On Thursday, September 20, a collection of anti-war groups sponsored a colloquium (PDF) at American University. Ten speakers — actually, eleven, because one wasn't on the program — delivered their perspectives, leading up to the presentation of the Sam Adams Associates Corner-Brightener Candlestick award to Sam Provance, a U.S. Army intelligence analyst who had been assigned to Abu Ghraib but followed his conscience and became a whistle-blower. The proceedings ran to three hour ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
American Predators
Advocates of U.S. military strikes against Iran are pushing as hard as they dare for a series of confrontations that the White House can use to drag the rest of government behind it in a new, exponentially expanded war. Rationally, this should not be happening, yet it would be imprudent in the extreme to minimize the risk. Or to underestimate the stupidity of Congress. Nevertheless, it's also quite helpful to hear from the optimistic side of things — if we just get over the next elec ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Look On My Works, Ye Mighty, And Despair!
This is the 100th show on Electric Politics. So it seems appropriate to cover a series of subversive topics with a genuinely revolutionary soul, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts. We talk about 9/11, about the emerging American police state, and about the realities of international economics which, unfortunately, all too few economists understand. Now, Craig calls himself a pessimist, but I detect an element of optimism here — certainly a fiery determination to make change happen. And as far as ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Celebrating Human Lives
It's almost pointless to go over all the rational reasons why a US attack on Iran doesn't make sense. The people that need to be convinced not to do it aren't thinking rationally — to them, what matters most is whether they might be able to get away with it. So, in a sense, going over pros and cons only encourages them to try stirring up enough confusion and laying enough blame to create the opportunity. Instead, they should be thought about, talked about, and treated as the criminal ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Chessmen of Darfur
When the Cold War ended we should've gotten a peace dividend. Less military spending, more peace. Instead, we got the first Gulf War. And then, Yugoslavia. Now the second Gulf War, and the beginning of what looks like a new Cold War. None of this even remotely supporting U.S. security interests — indeed, antithetical to them. The intellectual framework behind such adventures (intellectual may be an inaccurate term) attempts to replace three hundred and fifty plus years of the Westpha ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | |
