Electric Politics Podcasts

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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 : Liberal Language : English Also Listed as: City : Washington State/Province : DC Country : USA Region : NA User Tags: User Votes: RSS Feed Website People found this Podcast Searching for: View this Podcast on a Google Map. Podcast iTunes Link Text Only listing of Electric Politics Podcasts Methings.com listings of Electric Politics Podcasts If you like this podcast, you might also like:

Big Pharma, Unleashed In America, giant pharmaceutical corporations run roughshod over the public. They price gouge, charging 50% more than in civilized countries. They foist useless, often harmful — even deadly — drugs on the market. They profoundly corrupt the medical profession. Adding insult to injury, they pay unimaginable sums of money to get whatever they want from Congress. It's an outrageous situation. To learn the details of what's really going on I turned to Melody Petersen, who's been wr ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Baghdad Rumbled Forget Afghanistan for a moment. A lot of us, including me, have been worrying that the U.S. may be stuck in Iraq indefinitely. Quil Lawrence, however, says that that may not be the case. Quil, NPR's Baghdad bureau chief, has spent many recent years in Iraq, knows a great deal, has excellent judgment, and his reports must be taken seriously. Since I'm not there and he is, I defer to him despite my intellectual skepticism. I certainly hope he's right. It was great to talk again with Quil an ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Heartless Israel It's crazy-making to watch the world's indifference to Israel's grinding destruction of the Palestinians. There isn't really even a word for it — either the indifference or the criminal assault, and particularly the latter. But like it or not, admit it or not, Israel has thoroughly implicated America. To talk about all this I turned to a former CIA analyst, Kathleen Christison, whose recent book Palestine in Pieces (with co-author husband Bill Christison) gets pretty much everything ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Free Running Sometimes speaking truth to power, even when you're in power, means risking your life. That's why Abolhassan Banisadr, the first President of Iran following the 1979 revolution, fled in 1981 to take up political asylum in France. Nor has he seen eye to eye with the clerics ever since. What's surprising is that Mr. Banisadr's critique of the Iranian regime, of what's going on in Afghanistan, and of developments in the Islamic world generally, isn't pitched at particular contextual facts so ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website New Deal Reprise It would be unfair, and incorrect (which is worse?), to say that everything about modern economic theory is based upon delusional thinking about human behavior and markets. Or that the theory has become merely a threadbare excuse to worship greed. Nevertheless, mainstream economists, a priori, are to be regarded with the deepest suspicion. And so it's always refreshing to hear an alternative economic worldview, particularly from a financial practitioner who knows whereof he speaks. Marshal ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Building Seven The 9/11 truth movement keeps getting stronger. And the movement's assault on the establishment's preferred narrative, after eight years, has reduced it to a risible absurdity. An abundance of irrefutable scientific evidence exists. The problem remains, however, of getting people to turn their attention from special effects to reality. Many people, for many reasons, really want to believe that the wrong things are true. To help reawaken their critical faculties we have David Ray Griffin's l ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité Peace, a fundamental human right.  ✓  Health care, a fundamental human right.  ✓  An egalitarian society, a fundamental human right? Yes, let's add that last one, not because we're Communists, but because it makes sense — and not merely as a theoretical or an ethical fancy, but in hard-nosed pragmatic practice. Of course, it will take an historic political fight for the U.S. to get there... To explain the facts I turned to Richard Wilkinson, who is ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Forever From the Earth Farmers are an endangered species. Farmers who fight back against what's happening to them by farming smarter, even more so. But without farmers who respect and love the land, who farm in a sustainable way, we're goners. Here are a few human scale stories, as told by Lisa M. Hamilton, from her marvelous book Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness. Also a few policy questions to ponder. It was great to talk with Lisa — even if the problems seem intractable, t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ghosts in the Machine Mysticism and science overlap more than people usually recognize as the former usually promises, in one way or another, adepts a means to enlightenment under their own steam. It's one reason — a pretty good reason — why the early Christian fathers decided the Gnostic gospels were heretical texts, too dangerous to include in the New Testament. Anyhow, it should be no surprise that certain mystical experiences can be shown to have a scientific grounding. Here, I talk with John Ge ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ringmaster At this point, to be brutally realistic about it, there isn't much good to be said for Mr. Obama except, perhaps, that he's better than a Republican. One can only hope that he's susceptible to being pinned down by determined opponents from the progressive side of things. Due to widespread public outcry, for example, there may yet be a small chance for real health care reform. Considering these circumstances, it makes sense to study Mr. Obama's weaknesses. And to get a thoughtful appraisal ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Whither Afghanistan? What a tar baby. It's just not so simple to see how we get out of Afghanistan, either in the context of events over there or of politics here at home. One thing, though, is for sure: We won't win a military victory. To get a sense of how things are doing I turned to Wayne White, a former top intelligence analyst. We also talk about Iraq. I'm most grateful to Wayne for sharing his brilliant and exemplary insight. Anti-war arguments need all the help they can get! Total runtime an hour and t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website ABRACADABRA There's a surprising strain of magical thinking in American culture, indeed, in American politics, which bears examination. As it turns out, much of this is a relatively modern phenomenon dating from the middle of the nineteenth century — thus, in certain cases, political rhetoric which we see as typically American would have been completely unknown to the Philadelphia Convention. (For example, 'Yes, we can!') Anyhow, the whole larger issue of mysticism in American thought all too of ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Adjusted Narratives Very little in our mainstream public discourse makes sense anymore. In a way, we're trying to have a collection of meta-discussions about things, but we're not quite smart enough to manage it. What we need to do is figure out how to call a spade a bloody shovel (Oxford English Dictionary, 1919). To get at our narrative issues, including on specifics such as taxes, I turned to the very original and brilliant Larry Beinhart. It was extremely kind of Larry to take the time to talk with me and ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Unbelievable Here's 'something a little different' for your late summer listening pleasure. Stacy Horn, an occasional NPR contributor, has written a marvelous book, Unbelievable, about the Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory and its findings. Stacy thinks, and I very much agree, that Duke's research demonstrates the existence of something we cannot (yet) explain with conventional science. Possibly something of great importance. It was absolutely delightful to talk with Stacy and I'm so pleased sh ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Spasibo Moskva Personally, I think we owe the Russians a lot. Moscow unilaterally dismantled the Soviet Union, thereby ending the Cold War (or the first Cold War, according to Stephen F. Cohen), and making the world a much better, safer place. Clearly, we should welcome good relations instead of trying to take advantage. To get a sense of things Russian, I turned to Tom Lasseter, McClatchy's Moscow Bureau Chief. Tom is, I think, the future of print journalism. It's always a pleasure to talk with him, and ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Factory Girls One out of every ten persons on the planet, roughly, is a Chinese woman. It's fair to say that their entry into the twenty first century defines a modern China, and that that China is preoccupied with its own problems and is not particularly interested in exercising its considerable power abroad. To get at the story of Chinese women I turned to the journalist Leslie T. Chang, author of the fascinating book Factory Girls, who made a decade long journey into China to write it. A highly recom ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website From Heaven To Hell In a horrific sacrifice to darkness, the money men of Washington continue to sanction mountaintop removal for coal mining in Appalachia. This abomination must stop! It's Mr. Obama's sacrifice now, his irreversible legacy, an unmistakable mark of his true nature. Will he face down corporate coal, or will he shirk his responsibility? To get at the issue of mountaintop removal — including its implicit moral imperatives — I turned to Rob Perks, of the Natural Resources Defense Coun ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Health, Not Profits! It's scandalous that the U.S. lags so far behind the rest of the world when it comes to health care. It seems as if everybody but us has realized that it's immoral to profit from people's ill health and, conversely, that a healthy society tends to be a happier and more productive one. In any case, who better to explain the political jujitsu than a fellow who spent most of his professional life working the other side? It was a great pleasure to meet and talk with a convert, and I'm delighte ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website First Things First Most American economists are deep in an intellectual rut because they don't really understand that economics is about human behavior. Our choices cannot be reduced to a neat mathematical algorithm. If this seems theoretical, consider how it may apply to the possible demise of the Eurozone, if not the European Union itself, or the great advantages which could accrue to the U.S. through protectionism. Or how the political left benefits from a proper understanding of the issues. To get at som ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Deadly Dust It takes a theory to beat a theory. Up to now, that's played to the strengths of the establishment narrative for 9/11. But with the discovery and analysis of nano-thermite residue from dust collected in lower Manhattan immediately after 9/11, the counterfactual burden falls the other way. To get the story from the source I turned to Dr. Niels Harrit, lead author of a recent paper (.pdf) that examines the dust in exhaustive detail. A professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen fo ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Economic Snapshots The U.S. economy doesn't appear (anymore) to be falling off a cliff. On the other hand, bottoming out doesn't equal a recovery and we're still losing an awful lot of jobs. Jolly times with record bonuses for the bankers, but not so good for most people. For an economic update I turned again to James K. Galbraith, who's much more sensible than most economists. So sensible that he's less concerned with theory than with what works. It's always great to talk with James and I always manage to l ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Of Words and Warfare Not many newsrooms anymore have staff reporters who had covered Vietnam. George Wilson did, in 1968 and 1972, and he also covered the Second Gulf War in 2003. After over fifty years as a print reporter George is still working, now with the National Journal's CongressDaily... having that much experience, when George makes comparisons between Vietnam and Afghanistan we should pay attention. This conversation starts with Afghanistan and moves on to include a wide range of military topics. It ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Great Terror Bazaar "We're fighting in Afghanistan so that the Taliban don't attack New York." Well, no, I don't believe that. In fact, I have yet to hear a succinct explanation for why the U.S. is in Afghanistan. If staying in Afghanistan were to help stabilize Pakistan that might make some sense, but things don't seem to be working that way. Instead, we're seeing pretty much the opposite effect. So, why? To try to sift through some of the issues and to get a sense of the larger picture I turned to Graham E. ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Unmaking Modern Foreign Policy One might not suspect that the sociology of knowledge has much to do with foreign policy, or how government works, but it does. Except that it takes somebody quite brilliant, learned, experienced, and reasonably idealistic to understand the connections. For an intense tutorial in policy failures (and hints for success), I turned again to Roger Morris. It was very kind of Roger to take the time and I always enjoy his company. Total runtime an hour and twenty one minutes. Live for the future ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Single Minded Interlocutor The North Koreans don't want a war. It's not entirely clear whether Washington feels the same way. Following Pyongyang's second test of a nuclear device, and new missiles, rhetoric from both sides is reaching dangerous levels. To get some perspective on what's happening I turned once again to Dr. Bruce Cumings, perhaps the top U.S. expert on Korea, certainly one of the most sensible. It's always great to talk with Bruce and to get a reassuring dose of sanity. Total runtime one hour. Don't ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Preventing Nuclear Terrorism If, heuristically, we ask what the world would be like if an additional one or two dozen state actors possessed nuclear weapons, the answer is obvious: terrorists would have exponentially greater opportunities to steal a nuclear device or the materials with which to make one. Conversely, if the current crowd of nuclear weapons states were to make significant cuts in inventories, with the goal of zero, and pursue with greatly increased urgency international controls over explosive nuclear m ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Question of Conscience Israel could not do what's it's doing to the Palestinians if it were not for unconditional American support. So when the Israelis practice Apartheid, when they commit war crimes in Gaza, when they oppress the Palestinians at every turn... America is directly responsible. Most Americans (if and when they think about it) think that the Palestinian struggle is far away and not their problem. But that's wrong. The ideas and the behavior that we underwrite are profoundly malignant and they boom ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Remembering JFK One might suppose that with all that's been written about JFK there's little new to add. One would be wrong. Not exactly the cold warrior of conventional history, Jack Kennedy was turning, in a radical way, toward peace. It was too much for certain secret American power-brokers, who killed him. James W. Douglass does us a tremendous service with his revisionist history, JFK and the Unspeakable, which offers the most dramatic reminder that we can choose — indeed, that we must choose & ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Breaking Rank It takes a great deal of courage to admit a mistake on a controversial decision, even years after the fact. Virtually nobody gives you credit. You may even feel stupid. But history appreciates candor and that should afford some solace. Norm Stamper is probably most remembered, at the moment, for his being Chief of Police in Seattle during the 1999 WTO "Battle in Seattle." OK, he didn't handle it too well. Case closed. On many issues, nevertheless, Norm is a veritable beacon of enlightenmen ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Shadow Politics The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the Rosetta Stone of American politics. Was it a conspiracy and if so who, or what, was behind it? From a completely new direction Russ Baker has taken a thoughtful, massively researched look at the Bush family's involvement, as part of his larger study of Bush family political intrigue. As Russ puts it, an alternative title might be "Everything You Think You Know About American Politics Is Wrong." More suggestive than conclusive, Family of ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Raising Sand It takes courage to oppose our national obsession with war, particularly when one makes their opposition a vocation. And it's doubly rare to find such determination combined with a subtle intelligence and the experience to keep cultural differences in perspective. Susan Galleymore, born in South Africa and a naturalized American, has much to teach us about following our conscience. And please don't miss her outstanding program, Raising Sand Radio. Total runtime an hour and fourteen minutes ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Progressive for All Seasons Unusual for a denizen of Washington D.C., Sam Smith was born here. Now that he's pulling up stakes for small town life in Maine it'll be interesting to see whether, and how, his perspective on national issues changes. At any rate, thank goodness, he'll keep on producing his marvelous and unique Progressive Review. It's a national treasure, as is he. This one is a bit of a ramble — for which I take full responsibility. Total runtime an hour and twelve minutes. Enjoy! Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Poppy Palace Connect the dots. According to the UN's latest report, under U.S. occupation 92% of the world's opium production comes from Afghan poppies. Most of the heroin going to Europe is manufactured in or transits Turkey. The exact value to Turkey of its heroin exports is unknown but experts estimate a range in the tens of billions of dollars per year. The neocons helped establish and remain closely associated with Turkish lobbying efforts in the U.S. The question is, then: does the seamy side of ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Rising Seas Concentrate the Mind All too many members of the American intelligentsia dismiss concerns about global warming, all too often in collusion with the mainstream media. Freeman Dyson, for example, got extensive, sympathetic coverage of his skepticism in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine. As near as I can tell, critics confuse deficiencies in modeling with deficiencies in measurement, arguing models where measurements clearly show a warming planet. Unfortunate, because there's not a moment to lose. In Europe, ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Independent Alternatives There should be no doubt in anybody's mind: America's political problems are structural. How one slices and dices that may vary but without structural solutions — call them "reforms" — the system inexorably, increasingly will drain the life from ordinary people for the benefit of the very rich. To talk around today's politics from a longer-term, weathered perspective I turned to John R. MacArthur, of Harper's. It was great to talk with Rick, both for the substance and as an exa ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Great Game (Twenty First Century Version) It's not for nothing that Afghanistan has been called 'the graveyard of empire.' And the U.S. would be far, far better off had we never invaded. Now we're there, however, it's not quite so easy to get out, nor are the repercussions limited to Afghanistan — there's nuclear Pakistan to worry about, along with India, Iran, and the general neighborhood. An incredibly vexing situation. To get some thoughtful perspective I turned to Jonathan Landay, of McClatchy, who's been reporting regul ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website World Fellowship Foreign intelligence requires putting oneself into the skin of someone from another culture. Not always an easy thing to do. Nor are the realistic conclusions drawn from such experience always easy to accept. Which is why it's so critical for intelligence to be independent of politics — otherwise, it's pretty much useless flummery. Here's an eclectic conversation with Ray McGovern, a seasoned intelligence practitioner, where we think about some of the problems Mr. Obama has to deal w ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Upon Nature's Alter Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett — if he wasn't the inspiration for Indiana Jones, he should have been. I've always like adventure yarns, and this one has the benefit of being true. More than that, science is busy revising our understanding of pre-Columbian society in the Amazon. Far from being a "false paradise" pocked with primitive tribes it appears increasingly that the Amazon once was home to a sophisticated, relatively numerous people, capable of tremendous feats of civil enginee ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Presiding Over a Systemic Melt-Down It's worth repeating as often as possible: we're experiencing a systemic failure, a structural failure, one that can't be resolved without structural changes. What are the economic relations in our country? What should they be? Those are the right kinds of questions, and to help me sort through them I turned to the brilliant writer Mike Davis, who — I think — elevates common sense to a high art form. It was most kind of Mike to take the time and I hope we can talk again. Total ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website More Skullduggery Vague allegations of assassination have figured in General George S. Patton's death for years, but nobody managed to pull together all the threads until now. Robert K. Wilcox, in Target Patton, presents a very compelling case that not all is as it seemed. I'm not 100% convinced — maybe 85% — but there's just too much weirdness for the official story to hold up. For those, like me, who enjoy procedurals and tradecraft it's a terrific read, very highly recommended. It was kind of ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Land of Torture Reparations Nobody is above the law. But maybe, just maybe, the prudent thing is to find out the exact details of what's happened, first, before rushing into criminal indictments of George W. Bush and his former senior staff. In that light, for example, it doesn't make much sense to glibly disparage ideas of a "truth commission" that are being kicked about: anything that brings greater transparency is to be encouraged. To get a sense of how things stand I turned once again to Manfred Nowak, the UN Spe ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Goodbye "Old Normal," Hello "New Normal" The Obama administration, with the possible exception of President Obama himself, doesn't yet seem to have people able to think outside the economic box. It's not so much a question of their good faith, but whether their mental maps suffice. To get a sense of where we are and where we should be going I turned to Dr. James K. Galbraith, the brilliant and original political economist. His latest book, The Predator State, is a must-read and, however unorthodox his ideas, they belong in the fo ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Daring To Disarm The thing about nuclear weapons is, nobody can easily afford to make a mistake. Odds are, the more nuclear weapons people have, the more likely a mistake, and the more likely that a warhead, equipment, or know-how goes astray. On the other side of it, arguments about how to "win" a nuclear war remain implausible. So it's hard to see how these particular weapons are good for anything. Frankly, they're too dangerous to keep. But having built them, how do we get rid of them? For some deep ins ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Art of Plain Speaking In the UK press one frequently finds tough criticism of Israel. See, for example, this recent essay by Mark Steel in the Independent, a thoroughly mainstream UK paper. One cannot imagine a similar essay appearing in the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or the Los Angeles Times, or the Wall Street Journal, or USA Today, or indeed any other major American newspaper. Why not? Perhaps more taboo than mentioning the 'Israel Lobby,' is asking what's behind it, what makes it different than ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Barbarism in Gaza (and Zimbabwe) One wonders whether, if it weren't for the excessive delay between election and inauguration, Israel would still have attacked Gaza. In any case, Israel's assault being less a war than a hunt for naked prey, it's difficult, particularly here in the U.S., to get a feeling for what's happening. So I was fortunate in being able to turn to Martin Walker of the Times, who spoke to me from Jerusalem. We also talk about Zimbabwe, where Martin has spent much of the past year. And Somalia. I highly ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Motor City Detroit must have a guardian angel. How else to explain being the beneficiary of Bush's one and only correct decision of the past eight years? Detroit, the car-makers, the unions — all woven into our national experience and we'd be much poorer without them. To get a feeling for some of the history I turned to Dr. Kevin Boyle, author most recently of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (a National Book Award winner for nonfiction). It was kind of K ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Art of Interrogation It's fair to say that nobody knowledgeable about interrogations has ever produced a single example of torture working — either in the historical record or in contemporary experience — quite apart from consideration of the ethical implications. But proponents of torture find it all too easy to claim secret successes. So it's extremely helpful to hear once again the bright line admonition, never torture, from a seasoned interrogator who led the interrogation team in pursuit of Ab ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Hybrid Economies We tend to view FDR's economic revitalization efforts during the Great Depression in Keynesian terms, i.e., that government is the big spender of last resort. If not, however, for the advent of WWII, some Great Depression public works programs might well have evolved into permanent and prominent features of our economic landscape. As indeed the concept of public works has evolved elsewhere. To get a better perspective on what FDR did I turned to Nick Taylor, author of the recently publishe ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Of Coal and Corporations Micro-activism gets results. Take coal, for example, where a lot of loosely affiliated local activists are achieving what large environmental groups cannot: making coal a non-viable economic proposition for state and local governments, taking most proposed new coal plants off the drawing boards, and expediting the closure of old ones. To explain, I turned to Ted Nace, of Coalswarm. Ted is also a very successful entrepreneur, author, and free lance journalist. See Gangs of America for his l ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Postcard From Kabul Journalists, like diplomats, self-select into two groups: the large majority, those who hang around most of the time with people like themselves, and those who get out and about, make friends with the locals, maybe learn the local language. Anand Gopal of the Christian Science Monitor is the latter type, once even growing a beard and donning mufti to travel in Taliban controlled areas in Afghanistan's south. Kudos to him! I'm very grateful for his insights and I hope we can talk again, and ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Centrism Leads Nowhere As prospects for radical reform slip away the silver lining may be that Barack Obama reacts quickly when burned by mistakes. But in early days he could waste a lot of time, energy, and political capital (the latter somewhat unrecoverable) doing things the establishment way. For a check on Obama's honeymoon with the left I turned to the tough, realistic and insightful Bill Fletcher, Jr. of Black Commentator. Bill believes this is a long term game and that we've still got a lot of potential ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Something Amazing One chokes when one sees so many Clinton staffers taking up jobs in the new Obama administration (not to mention rumors that Hillary herself may be offered a cabinet position). The word despair comes to mind. Yet give credit where credit is due. Having accomplished the impossible, Obama now faces even bigger challenges — and as they say, in crisis, opportunity. Our duty is to keep pushing him to the left. For a positive take on the election I turned to the brilliantly commonsensical ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Keep On Keeping On Here's an optimistic look at nuclear nonproliferation. Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, the eponymous Arms Control Wonk, believes the stage is set for significant progress, and what he's saying makes sense to me. I sure hope he's right, and I hope the new Obama administration seizes the opportunity for some relatively easy deals. It was great to talk with Jeffrey and I hope I can tap his expertise again. Total runtime forty eight minutes. Look on the bright side! ☮ Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Election Watch 2008 No doubt the Republicans will cheat. No doubt the Republicans will try to deny the vote to as many potential Democratic Party voters as they can. No doubt the Republicans will lose. The only question is by how much. To get some of the flavor of the campaign I turned again to Amy Sullivan, a correspondent for Time magazine, who's got the knack for politics. Without predicting Tuesday's results we talk about the campaign so far. It was a treat to talk again with Amy and I hope we can revisit ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Reinventing Russia For better or for worse Russian history plays out over an extraordinarily long scale. And, with all due respect, it's probably fair to say that Russian society has not yet made it into modern times, existing, as it were, in a kind of parallel world. One with great flashes of innocence and genius. More's the pity, then, that America so poorly understands Russia and, particularly, seems overly disposed to thinking that it is the enemy. To try to put things into a better perspective and fill ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Where's the Virus? What a wonderful world! So why is it that often people don't find themselves free to exercise their natural curiosity about things? When reputable — indeed, extraordinarily distinguished — scientists began to question whether HIV causes AIDS the backlash was stunning. Yet, to me, as a non-scientist, the skeptics make a lot of sense. And I question the establishment's explanation for why nobody has actually isolated an "HIV" virus. Perhaps the more radical case that HIV doesn't, ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Economic Realities Yes, we have a financial crisis. But more fundamentally we have a jobs crisis: we don't have a healthy, modern industrial base and, in particular, we aren't making enough advanced industrial things to export. In short, our consumption is based on borrowing from abroad. And that can't go on indefinitely. To talk about both the immediate crisis and the larger structural problems I turned once again to Paul Craig Roberts who is always a source of great practical wisdom. Total runtime an hour ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Surge, Splurge, Gurge By this time, only someone of extreme naïveté and inexperience could believe that the U.S., through force of arms, might bring democracy and stability to Afghanistan and Iraq. The reality is that ultimately the U.S. military will be — must be — utterly swallowed up. I have long maintained that our "leaders" who put us in those places surely understood that. Why exactly we are there, then, I don't know. History will judge. Specifically regarding Iraq, despite John Mc ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website No Fear What with Paulson's Plunder in motion, this conversation on the economy with Jeff Madrick, recorded Monday of last week, is a bit overtaken by events. But not entirely, by any means. Jeff is a sensible, practical, and passionately eloquent left economist who's been around for a long time. His general disposition (including political observations) remains as true today as it was when we spoke and as it no doubt will continue to be going forward. Indeed, I find the distance of a week here a ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Forensic Science 101 Even the choice of the day — 9/11 — is not something that a real Muslim terrorist would do. More likely, it seems to me, it's evidence of a western mind at work branding a nightmarish new ad campaign. And although the farther in time we get from 9/11 the easier it may be to sift through technical facts, to me it still causes extreme discomfort to acknowledge the cloud of evil, the profound treachery, directed by high American officials. Indeed, I suspect that in the long run pu ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Out of Control Immigration At some point — who knows where? — if we do not control immigration into America, legal and illegal, it will control us. One of two core issues that the left habitually gets wrong (the other being gun control), immigration, nevertheless, has the potential to bring the left and the right together. To get at some of the thorny issues I turned to the brilliant political demographer Dr. Steven A. Camarota. It was generous of Steve to talk with me, I very much enjoyed the discussion ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mortgage Meltdown Blues It's impossible to say yet whether we've fully weathered the mortgage crisis. Things look to be stabilizing but if the economy turns down much more there could be another tsunami of defaults, this time among prime borrowers with negative equity who decide to walk away from their homes. Something that's both economically rational and, perhaps surprisingly, legal (although culturally frowned upon). We'll see. My own view is that we won't have put the crisis behind us until we start to re-reg ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Way of Non-violence In his recent autobiography, A Persistent Peace, Father John Dear writes about his practice of non-violent civil disobedience (which has resulted in his being arrested many dozens of times and serving jail sentences) and his revolutionary faith in the emergence of a non-violent world. Like his role model, Mahatma Gandhi, John practices vegetarianism and, also like Gandhi, John personally lives an abstemious life. Saintly, some say, but I take the point made by George Orwell who, in writing ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Present at the (Cartoon) Creation One of the things people don't generally get about R. Crumb, and which in his self-deprecating way he may somewhat overlook himself, is his sense of kindness and fair play. He sees, and draws, not just the odd, amazing, tragic, surreal and funny things about human beings, but also good things, including the good we see in ourselves — even when it may not be strictly true. Called by the noted art critic Robert Hughes the "only genius the 1960s underground produced in visual art, eithe ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Art of Laughter In the spirit of summertime and for 'something a little different' here's a conversation with Jos Houben, an internationally acclaimed performance artist, writer, director, producer, and teacher at the Jacques Lecoq theater school in Paris. Laughter is a gift, really, and we should share it more often. Even, perhaps especially, in politics. Many thanks to Jos for taking time to talk with me — he's an absolutely delightful person. Total runtime an hour and three minutes. Enjoy! Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website National Intelligence's New Profit Centers According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, of funds disbursed by the U.S. government for intelligence work about 70% go to private contractors. The overall budget, of course, remains classified. Money details aside, the process of turning intelligence into a business inexorably leads to rotten results. And combined with questions as to the overall level of government surveillance of ordinary Americans' everyday lives, it adds up to a big problem. To get at what's hap ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Pursuit of Justice The late Deng Xiaoping had it about right — many years ago he said he didn't care if a cat were white or black, so long as it caught mice (actually, a Sichuan proverb). I feel that way about international criminal justice: in many instances it hasn't worked out, in some, regardless how contrary to legal norms, it has; and I don't preclude the possibility it may work quite satisfactorily in certain cases in the future. Indeed, I look forward to it. The key word being justice, not cons ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Waiting for Barack Obama From time immemorial politicians have promised the moon. Some delivered. My natural inclination regarding Barack Obama is to be skeptical and cautious because he hasn't yet really been tested. On the other hand, he's shown a remarkable ability to bring people together and he tends to say the right thing in the right way at the right time. See, for example, his great speech yesterday in Berlin. Moreover, people whose judgment about people is better than mine tend to trust him. To kick aroun ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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 | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Anthropogenic Climate Change The main knock against anthropogenic climate change — more or less unchanged since the 1980s — is that a cabal of cunning computer modelers have managed to dupe, co-opt, bamboozle, or intimate climate scientists into believing fantastic, yet unsubstantiated, allegations. Recently put forward by the redoubtable Freeman Dyson, this critique also, unfortunately, picks up a certain amount of support in the progressive community. To help dispel these arguments and the confusion they ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Art of Dissent At any given time there are probably only about 100 foreign service officers who are truly extraordinary. Scattered across lots of different offices around the world, of all different ranks, they are the working elite, the master craftsmen of diplomacy. In his day, Roger Morris was among them. It's a real privilege for me to talk with Roger, who had the brains and the guts to resign his commission (together with Anthony Lake) over a major policy issue, the US invasion of Cambodia in the sp ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Dave of Al Jazeera It's a pity that the Al Jazeera English service, for all intents and purposes, isn't available in the US cable market. Due, no doubt, to US government pressure — however maladroitly applied. Nonetheless, to those for whom it is available internationally Al Jazeera provides a vital corrective to sanitized American infotainment productions, particularly regarding reporting about the US. A diplomatic reminder that things are usually more complicated than the standard packaged narratives ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Just Following Orders When the Cheney-Bush administration orders its minions to torture prisoners, prisoners from whom habeas has been stripped, prisoners thrown, essentially, into an oubliette, those actions place the United States squarely in the totalitarian tradition. Categorically, it is not the behavior of a democracy. Lest we despair to the point of acquiescence, the fulgent ideals of law do suggest both a correction and an ultimate accounting. To try to get at these issues I talk with Elisa Massimino, d ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Yesterday This Day's Madness Did Prepare One fact to keep in mind. Instead of taking their recent, unprecedented, and obscene profits and reinvesting them, big oil companies are returning the money to shareholders as dividends. Ergo there's no more oil to be discovered. We know that for other reasons, but if somebody tries to argue with you about Peak Oil, just point out to them that big oil has zero interest in getting at the truth. Or big oil's lackeys. To take another tour d'horizon of the Peak Oil situation I turned to David ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Art of Intelligence It takes genuine commitment, and guts, to move from being a top CIA analyst to a leading progressive activist. Ray McGovern not only writes brilliant political essays on the internet, he puts himself right on the line — as he did this last Monday, getting arrested with Cindy Sheehan and Rev. Lennox Yearwood in Representative Conyers' office, protesting Conyers' inactivity on impeachment. One of these days maybe I'll have the honor of getting arrested with him, too, trying to keep Ame ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Reivers' Redress Howard Zinn says that Joe Bageant "...evokes working class America like no one else." Joe does, in fact, bring us a large dose of raw intelligence from the hinterlands. And a particularly convincing argument, laid out more fully in his recent book Deer Hunting With Jesus, why if the Democrats can't enlist poor white working people they'll not only continue to lose elections but could hardly be called the "liberal" party. I thoroughly enjoyed talking with Joe — I not only appreciate h ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Peak Oil Politics According to a recent International Energy Agency report (subscription), cast in moderate diplomat-speak, the world is now officially running out of oil. It's a genuine milestone that within short order has led to the creation in the UK of an All-Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil and Gas, and this week the admission by one of the pillars of the UK media establishment, William Rees-Mogg, that "the world is coming to the end of the age of oil." In the UK, at least, energy policy is now o ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Art of Being There's a lot of strange stuff out there, if only people open their eyes to see it. Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut and the sixth man to walk on the moon, got a good look and has had the courage — and kindness — to tell the rest of us. A helpful soul. If you want an idea of what the future has in store give a listen, as Dr. Mitchell talks about space, NASA, UFOs (including Roswell), and consciousness and the quantum hologram. To find out more, please visit the organizat ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Belgian Intellectual When a practicing theoretical physicist turns his attention to politics, picking up the progressive flag, political types should pay attention. Jean Bricmont, of the Catholic University of Louvain, is not only a prolific researcher in his profession but goes well beyond, writing about everything from the philosophy of science ("Determinism, Chaos, and Quantum Mechanics," PDF) to culture (Fashionable Nonsense), to politics — his latest being Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Right ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Memory and National Identity When a country can't remember its own history — or doesn't want to — it risks losing more than dusty museum relics. It could lose its soul. That's what happens when the U.S. constitution is routinely flouted, or when, in extremis, a U.S. warship is sacrificed upon the alter of political expediency. If the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, on June 8, 1967, had succeeded in sinking her with all hands then this history, indeed, would have been permanently lost. But by some miracl ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Horrors of Apartheid One way — only one way — exists for Israel to become a normal state at peace with its neighbors: it must abandon its delusional world of 19th century nationalism for modern principles of equal justice and equal rights for all its people. Otherwise, Israel's future will remain tormented. Implicating the U.S., as it does, this question surely cannot belong to Israel alone, nor can outsiders ignore it without peril. Jewish supremacists, unless brought to their senses, have the pow ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Garden of Technological Delights A co-founder of the top website Ars Technica, Jon "Hannibal" Stokes may not be Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but in immediate, critical ways he's making technology accessible to the rest of us. Plus which, as a theologian-in-training at the University of Chicago, Jon's insights into the nature and history of the relationship between technology and society go well beyond what we expect from the technologically adept. To me, Jon's a fascinating character, and I'm very grateful to him for shootin ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Fallacy of Full Spectrum Dominance The establishment's bête noir of the year award should go to Chalmers Johnson, for his book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. (Reviewed quite recently and most favorably, to their credit, at the New York Review of Books.) A card-carrying former cold warrior and for decades one of the top U.S. experts on Asia, Chalmers has been seriously re-thinking the big picture, assembling a meticulous structural critique of where we're headed — one that's impossible to ignore ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Stellar Heresy In the past, people were always getting scientific things wrong — often laughably so. But modern science doesn't make those big mistakes anymore, or does it? Dr. Halton C. Arp thinks so. An eminent American astrophysicist, Dr. Arp was at the center of our scientific establishment until he insisted on talking about his observations from Mount Palomar, of red-shift, and what they mean for cosmology. No way to know how old the universe is, except that it's much, much older than conventi ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Akrasia in Iraq The other day Gary Kamiya had an insightful essay at Salon to the effect that Bush hasn't been impeached because his "warmongering spoke to something deep in our national psyche." I think that's right — not enough people have made the connection between the pervasive tinpot militarism of American society and the persistence of gangsters successfully masquerading as national leaders. One way to undo the damage is to think clearly about what is actually happening in our wars of choice; ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Deconstructing Justice If what you want is a banana republic what you do is hollow out the main departments of the executive branch from within until nothing but politics remains. A military coup naturally, probably inevitably, ensues. Sometimes I wonder — is that what Republican chieftains intend? Or are they so stupid that they actually don't see where their actions are taking us? Probably it's a mix of both. If the Tyrant could have a coup on his own terms he'd seize it. Which is why the administration' ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 911 Truth So you implement one of the most stupendous black-ops of all time. Considering the multitude of variables, you've put together a fairly convincing cover story that fixes blame on Islamic terrorists. Using the full weight of the political establishment you bulldoze away public discussion of the truth. A complaisant press repeats your lies in a ciclo infinito forte. Though a few malcontents won't buy it, they're marginalized. Then along comes your worst nightmare: a distinguished theologian ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Congo Lives, Part II This is the second part of my interview with Larry Devlin (see prior show). Less "interview-ish," it consists largely, but not entirely, of light banter and story-telling. And I do encourage listeners to buy Larry's book, Chief of Station, Congo, a pretty darn good read. I was absolutely delighted to talk with Larry, am very grateful to him for taking the time, and I think I learned a few things in the bargain. Total runtime here of forty eight minutes. Enjoy! Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Congo Lives, Part I One of the things I admire about Larry Devlin, who's got a new book out, Chief of Station, Congo, is his knack for getting things done. Call it implementation genius — not so many people have it... And I believe his motivations were honorable. Moreover, if you look, for example, at his judgment as applied to contemporary problems, like Iraq, you'll see how he makes a lot of sense. Some may complain that Larry was single-handedly responsible for wrecking most of post-colonial sub-Saha ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website U.S. Welfare Tickets Just as the U.S. spends more per capita for health care than other industrial states only to get less in terms of actually delivered services, we spend (believe it or not) nearly on par with our peers in terms of overall welfare programs, but again come up short in the results department. Of course, it's a political problem not a technical problem... To get some perspective on what's happening I turned to Chris Howard, a truly nice guy and author of The Welfare State Nobody Knows. I don't ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website UN Limits? The United Nations has strict limits on what it can do, argues Shashi Tharoor, because it cannot exceed the political consensus of its leading member states. Shashi, until recently the UN's Undersecretary General for Communications and Public Information, is as well placed as anybody could be to understand such things. But is Shashi right to accept such limits without having in mind alternatives of what the UN should be like? And is the UN any more likely to remain relevant in the 21st cen ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website "Yes"to Health Care Reform We're always hearing about "the best is the enemy of the good." Or "half aloaf is better than nothing." Especially in politics. Which it's true that most of life is made up of compromises, but not all. "Compromise" is not carved in stone — sometimes half a loaf isn't better than nothing and sometimes to get something even approximately right you've got to scrap what you've got. The health care system in the U.S. is exactly that way. But we need not fear experimenting in the dark: plen ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website L'Orage Probably more than any other single event, hurricane Katrina exposed the emptiness of federal "national security" mumbo jumbo. I don't think the Tyrant ever recovered — or can recover — from his shocking display of ineptitude. Or indifference. And in the aftermath we're faced with a new, interesting existential problem: what to do about New Orleans? 3,000-plus miles of the Mississippi wants to bypass it, southern Louisiana is subsiding rapidly into the Gulf of Mexico while simu ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Midwestern Common Sense Now almost a century later (imagine that!) I wonder what Krazy Kat would have thought of the internet?It seems sometimes like the internet's been around forever, but it's really a very new thing. The net's impact on politics, already significant and rapidly evolving, should become a central factor within just a few years. To get a sense of what's going on from the perspective of grassroots Wisconsin — historically one of the great incubators of American political thought — I tur ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Urbi et Orbi There's always been the sandwich-board crowd, telling us to repent as the end of the world is upon us. Beyond them, my sense is that human beings tend to have a deep-seated fear of planetary scale catastrophe (indeed, I'd love to find a good history of catastrophe thinking); why, I don't know. But we do now seem to have arrived at something new: a humanity induced set of simultaneous crises that is on the verge of critically stressing civilization. Since I've picked up this theme in bits an ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Sky Is Falling (Or Not) Bill Moyers says Jeff Chester "is the Paul Revere" of the internet revolution. Well, maybe not. It's true that Jeff is fighting some of the right corporate exploiters of culture — and it should be noted that Moyers has had plenty of experience fighting that same fight in the broadcast world — but it is unclear to me, still, how well or not the known history of broadcast maps onto the world of the internet. No doubt many powerful groups would like to see the internet turned into ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Price of Real Estate in Baghdad It's important to keep in mind that there are no easy options for theU.S. in Iraq. But that's not to say we shouldn't be realistic. As the calamity narrows our choices for us it becomes increasingly important to pay attention to what's actually happening instead of to the spin coming from those at several levels of remove from events, whether Pooh-bahs in the Emerald City or in Versailles on the Potomac. Tom Lasseter, of McClatchy, performs a tremendous service — at great personal ris ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Can Iraq Be"Fixed"? This podcast is one in a series of collaborations between EP and the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information. Here, I organized a panel discussion on Iraq, held at the National Press Club on Wednesday, February 28th. The moderator is Alton Frye, panelists are Ted Galen Carpenter, Helle Dale, Doug Macgregor, Frank Gaffney and Frank Anderson. I offer them all my profound thanks for their participation in an outstanding discussion, and I particularly want to thank ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ecological Economics Sometimes it takes an Irishman to shake things up and set them right. In the field of economics — the only discipline in the social sciences to have thrown out all ties with its origins, the only one to claim its authority supersedes that of all its sister disciplines (a mind-boggling assertion), and the only to effectively sanctify the wholesale destruction of our planet — change has long been overdue. Instead of playing with advanced mathematics economists should get out in t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mobile Chernobyls: Coming Soon to a Transportation Hub Near You! Mea Maxima Culpa. It wasn'tuntil recently (within the past year) when I began to ask myself about the true cost of nuclear power that I became skeptical. After reading Helen Caldicott, and talking with her, I'm now an anti-nuclear believer. Actually, if you stop and think about it just a little bit, it doesn't make sense to create vast quantities of a super lethal waste product that remains super lethal for hundreds of thousands of years, especially when we have no idea — none — ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website VAT: A Tax Too Fair In the U.S., most people hate taxes. Why is that? Well, they've been brainwashed that taxes are bad, but logicallyit also would seem reasonable to suppose that Americans don't like taxes because it's painfully obvious that we get so little in return. That's something quite unique ("great" if you're chauvinistically inclined) about America, setting us apart from every other industrial democracy. To put taxes in perspective I turned to Neil Brooks, a Canadian tax expert, and coauthor of a bri ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Hamiltonian Conservatism The real fight in America isn't between the right and the left, but between people who want representative democracy and people who prefer corporate control. "What's best for the country" used to be an attitude that one assumed existed in public officials. Now, hidden agendas and bad faith all too often drive honor out of the system. A corrupted politics brazenly exults in its priorities of money and power. So it's refreshing to talk with somebody with whom I may disagree about all sorts o ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Achilles In Vietnam On January 16 of this year, back in Minnesota from Iraq, a young Marine hanged himself with an electrical cord. What's particularly troubling is that he'd begged the local VA hospital several times to be admitted and treated for suicidal depression and psychological injuries from combat, but was refused, only to be put on a waiting list. A symptom, no doubt, of a deeply disordered system. One can hate the war — and, properly, one does — but what about the warrior? How do the res ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Republic, or A Monarchy? Last November the voters sent a pretty clear message: "We're fed up, we think the country should be on a different track, and we want to see some accountability." Now that the Democratic party has taken control of Congress the question is whether they'll exercise that power according to their mandate — or were they merely the lesser hypocrites? Most importantly, will they accede to the Tyrant's unconstitutional aggrandizement of executive power or will they challenge it? Are the Democ ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website In Search of Renewables It might seem too good to be true: solar power, poised to become part of our energymix in a big way, thanks solely to market forces. Not only that, but the Solar Revolution bypasses centralized, hierarchical market structures and introduces a new era of decentralized, locally managed power generation. Presto, many of our problems solved. In other circumstances one might suspect that Travis Bradford—a thirty something overachiever with no background in energy, who rented a place in Spa ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Local Power It's always fun to talk with Sam Smith, even when I'm a bit slow on the uptake. Here we have a very informal shooting-the-breeze sort of conversation, but in a low-key way Sam's actually laying out a fairly consistent philosophy of devolving as much political and economic power as possible to the local level. Listening the second time, while editing, I started to get the picture. So forgive my slowness—and I hope our bouncing around of ideas gives you something to think about during t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Down To The Last (Cheap) Drop Back in 1798 Malthus popularized the idea of animpending, catastrophic scarcity of the essentials of life, or at least permanently attached his name to gloomy forecasts. Since then, Malthusians of various stripes have been eager to find evidence of critical scarcity—any scarcity—that might validate their beliefs. In vain. As economists explain, when goods become scarce their prices rise and market forces generate substitutes. All well and good, until now. Petroleum is different: ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Podcast Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 'Tis But A Scratch! Nobody knows why the Black Knight guards his bridge, or for that matter Draco his gold. Seemingly irrational,they nevertheless represent real obstacles to be overcome. Conceived in bureaucratic terms it's the difference between the formal bureaucratic hierarchy and the informal network that really keeps things moving: understanding the latter takes a certain kind of genius. A maverick. For decades at the Pentagon Chuck Spinney—an insider's insider—fought the good fight, mostly ( ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Off To The Big House Ask people what Bush's biggest mistake has been, most will say Iraq. And Iraq is a cornerstone of his "war on terror." Take away Iraq, most of his remaining popular support—such as it is—falls to pieces. Elizabeth de la Vega, a former Federal prosecutor, drives that point home in her witty new book which involves the presentation of a hypothetical indictment, for conspiring to push the country into war, to a hypothetical grand jury. As propaganda (the good kind) it's aces. And ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Little Town of Bethlehem It's amazing that what likes to thinkof itself as the world's premiere religion, Christianity, exhibits little organized concern that what presumably is one of its holiest sites—the birthplace of its founder—should be turned into an open prison camp surrounded by high concrete walls, owned and operated by fanatical followers of a rival religion, dedicated to the collective abuse and coercion of a people who are mainly adherents of yet a third religion. What hypocrites these Chri ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mr. Green I voted for Ralph Nader for President, twice. I'd probably do the same again—as a protest vote—but I must admit, Ralph has been an unmitigated disaster, not least because he failed to build alternative institutions after his campaigns. At any rate, I was quite curious to know whether in our latest election leading Greens had a pulse. Peter Miguel Camejo, Ralph's stalwart vice-presidential running mate in 2004, was running for California Governor on the Green Party ticket for th ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Paradise Lost This is a public service podcast of a presentation by Dr. Bob Bowman, on 9/11, at a symposium organized by dc911truth.org held Saturday, November 11, at George Mason University's Arlington campus. Dr. Bowman—who last week got 44% of the vote in Florida's 15th congressional district—makes a reasonable case for further investigation into the events of 9/11, without pre-judging the outstanding questions. It's a model political analysis for activists. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Clean Water: A Basic Human Right I always think it's fascinating to talk with people working on the front lines to make our planet a better place to live—or liveable at all. Karin Krchnak is the international water expert at The Nature Conservancy (with over four billion dollars in assets it is, I believe, the largest environmental organization in the US). She knows, as well as anybody, what the problems are and where we should look for solutions, though she's pretty realistic about what to expect. And she's easy to ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Get 'Cher Fresh, Hot, Highly Enriched Uranium Here!! In the popular imagination Cold War custodians of the bomb had a Dr. Strangelove zeitgeist. What we often forget is that most people doing the work did it with deeply humanitarian impulses—the very last thing they wanted to see was the bomb in use. Especially not against civilians. So it's a real pleasure and an honor to talk with someone who worked at the highest levels in both bomb making and nuclear weapons policy, who is now one of the country's foremost dissidents, opposing the ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Guantánamo Sometimes we don't appreciate what we've got until we've lost it. That's certainly the case with constitutional protections recently wiped out by the Military Commissions Act. And it wouldn't be surprising if the loss didn't really sink in until some indeterminate future circumstance resulted in egregious executive actions affecting large numbers of innocent citizens. But don't give up yet! Col. Will Gunn, USAF (Ret.) was on the front lines early on in this constitutional fight, in charge ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Exploit, Impoverish, Abandon "A job should keep you out of poverty, not keep you in it." It's not easy to know where to start in trying to alleviate poverty but one good place would be by raising the minimum wage. Not only do hundreds of prominent economists agree that that would be a very good thing, so does a large majority of the public. The Reverend Dr. Paul Sherry, former head of the United Church of Christ, is coordinating a campaign to make it happen, called Let Justice Roll. Dr. Sherry was very kind to talk wi ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Theory and Policy One of America's all-time great economists, Professor William J. Baumol recently has made a major contribution to economic theory, along with Ralph E. Gomory, in their book Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests. It's the first systematic reworking of trade theory since David Ricardo, and in it they show, beyond any doubt, that in some circumstances—not uncommon circumstances in today's world—free trade will not be to the overall benefit of one of the trading partners. ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Case For Intellectual Integrity It would be refreshing to find somebody who doesn't agree with 9/11 conspiracy theories (so-called) who was willing to debate them in a civil way. And I don't mean the editors of Popular Mechanics, either. Perhaps the civil ones are changing their minds? One such is Bill Christison, the distinguished former CIA analyst and popular author of progressive political essays. Within the past year Bill has changed his mind about 9/11, from rejecting conspiracy theories outright to thinking that t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Biodiversity Necessities Sometimes it seems the cost of progress will be a barren planet earth. If we don't heat the place up beyond the point where it sustains life we'll kill off most life apart from ourselves anyway. With species going extinct at an estimated 1,000 times the natural rate, how much longer can that go on without our becoming permanently, critically impoverished? The Convention on Biological Diversity labors in semi-obscurity, overshadowed by its sibling on Climate Change, but both together repres ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Dangerous Delusions He's got top-notch judgment, he's scrupulous about facts, he's well spoken, a powerful writer, and he's one of the top five or so western journalists in the middle east, even if he is an independent and less well known. I'm quite proud, actually, to bring you this fascinating conversation with Jonathan Cook, from Nazareth. If you're interested in getting beneath the surface of what Israel is all about, seriously, do yourself a favor and buy his recent book, Blood and Religion: The Unmaskin ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Common Sense In the good old days a couple bicycle mechanics could invent the aeroplane. Today, sometimes it seems you've got to be a cog in a bigger machine in order to do anything, but that really isn't the case, and it's especially not true when it comes to intellectual sensibilities. We can thank the technology of the internet for dramatically widening our lateral experiences, and making possible the dissemination of critical, original contributions from people at all levels of the vertical hierarc ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Israel Lobby and the US Response To War In Lebanon This is an EP Public Service Podcast of a presentation organized by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, at the National Press Club, on Monday, August 28. The guest speakers are Professors Mearsheimer and Walt, who discuss the applicability of their controversial paper regarding the pro-Israel Lobby to Israel's war against Lebanon. With my very brief introduction the total podcast runtime is an hour and twenty four minutes. I recorded it and am solely responsible for any flaws ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Art of Diplomacy I think it'd be very difficult to find many people like Ambassador Ed Peck (Ret.) in the foreign service these days. There's been so much politicization of the personnel process that people with curiosity, common sense, and an open mind have largely been driven out by apparatchiks. Nevertheless, it's interesting to listen to a veteran middle east hand who calls it as he sees it, and one can only hope that such types, at some point, will again be the norm for American diplomats. It's always ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Art of Listening Here's a reasonably thorough briefing on the middle east from a fellow who was until recently one of the top analysts in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. In addition to a being a balanced assessment of the subject it's a rare window into how INR typically tots up its accounts. Wayne White is a very smart guy who isn't shy about his ethics—I found this conversation particularly invigorating and I hope Wayne returns periodically to talk with EP. Total runtime ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Bombarded By Abominable Lies In at least one fundamental respect JFK's speech on the press has become archaic: He didn't have in mind anything like today's corporate Frankenstein of a miniscule number of owners in control of the vast majority of mainstream media outlets. A Ministry of Propaganda, these days, would only get in the way of eager flacks leaping to do government's bidding. Exceptions, nevertheless, exist. On the inside, as chief middle east correspondent for ABC news for ten years, Charlie Glass was one of ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The President And The Press Here's a speech that JFK gave to the American Newspaper Publishers Association, at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, April 27, 1961. It's particularly interesting in comparison with his 1963 American University Commencement speech, because while JFK, in 1961, was still in the thrall of a Cold War mentality he shows abundant signs of breaking free: He hasn't quite gotten to the full-fledged radical idealism he ultimately found but you can see the wheels turning as he speaks. Though this spee ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Heuristic Devices There's a lot of buzz these days about 'Fourth Generation Warfare.' Frankly, I'm a little skeptical about how useful this abstract construct may be, but I recognize that it's got a lot of people thinking and I reckon that thinking about insurgency warfare is better than not thinking about it. For a perspective from the trenches from one of the more intellectual practitioners of the art, I turned to Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, USMC (ret.), author of The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Bread And Butter Calumnies How often do you see an imaginative, incisive, and utterly original structural analysis of American political rhetoric? Not very. (Well, you may not be looking for them, but that's not the issue.) Kevin Baker's recent article in Harper's is a jem, making a stunning point that I dare say even the most diehard history buff will never have seen or thought of before. Though I may quibble with bits and pieces, he's definitely on to something that's an important part of the puzzle, and I'd sugge ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Prophetic Acts When your government as a routine matter engages in torture, you're in trouble. It does affect you, and every other citizen. It should provoke outrage. We often ask why, during the Nazi era, more German clergy didn't speak out, as Karl Barth did. Or why greater numbers of ordinary Germans didn't speak out. I update such questions, in that form, with the Reverend Dr. George Hunsinger, Professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and founder of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website God vs. The Gavel If the rise of the fundamentalist Christian right has thrown a scare into you, if you think the US is headed towards a theocracy (as Kevin Phillips says) but that isn't your cup of tea, then you may find comfort in Marci Hamilton's rather ferocious attack on efforts by diverse religions to wheedle their way around the law, whether it's about child molestation, property rights, prisoners' issues, or White House Christmas cards. Hers is a particularly important view to understand because as ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Terra Incognita It's odd, thinking about the prospect of preemptive war against Iran. What, after all, do people generally know about Iran? How many could find Teheran on a map? Can you? What Deborah Campbell discovers—having lived and traveled for six months in Iran within the past year—makes it clear that we've got a manufactured crisis. You may not agree with her, but hers is a valid window into a foreign culture we really should understand better. I whole-heartedly endorse, btw, her brand ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cosmic Recyclables "I have been born more times," Mark Twain wrote, "than anybody except Krishna." Who says the idea of reincarnation isn’t an American tradition? There may be few roads and fewer signs, but the intrepid Division of Perceptual Studies within the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia has for over forty years been scientifically studying evidence of children's memories of previous lives, as well as other puzzling phenomena. An Assistant Professor in the Division and Medical Dir ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website President Eisenhower's Farewell Speech This speech is a classic—a bit dry, but excellent—which everyone should be familiar with (I'm inspired to make it available after watching "Why We Fight"). All Eisenhower's worst fears have now come true to a more dire extent even than he'd envisioned. Unchecked, the US military complex today, like cheap silver driving out gold, is well on its way to supplanting all other political forces. Let's keep the forecast plain and simple: without a winning strategy for grassroots activ ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Forum on Security and Foreign Policy This is an EP public service podcast of the Forum on Security and Foreign Policy, hosted by George Mason University. This event was organized and co-sponsored by The National Affairs Standing Committee of the Fairfax County Democratic Committee and the George Mason University Young College Democrats. It took place on Wednesday, June 21. The two speakers are Congressman Bill Pascrell, Jr. of New Jersey's 8th district and Tyler Drumheller, recently retired from the CIA where he was Chief of ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website I Protest, Therefore I Am If you want to hear a former senior CIA analyst recite hauntingly beautiful, poignant German poetry, in German (with running translation), from memory, to better picture a point about our descent into authoritarianism, then you won't hear it here because the digital recorder stopped recording—operator error—ten minutes before the end of our conversation, going unnoticed until later. Oh well. It was very kind of Ray McGovern to come back to EP, I highly value his subtle, nuanced ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Diplomatic Rapprochement (Or Not) I wonder whether anybody in the US government ever stops and thinks of the absurdity involved in trying to maintain a divided Korea? Not just the absurdity of telling Koreans North and South that we won't let them have what they want, but the absurdity of telling all the main actors in Northeast Asia how best to organize regional security, against their wishes. However things used to be, the fact is that today the US is more a source of tension than a calming presence. To get a handle on w ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Critical Strategic Thought It takes remarkable courage to speak out from within the system, particularly when you're at the pinnacle of the defense establishment's educational system for advanced training. Greg Foster, a decorated infantry company commander during the Vietnam War and for twenty two years a professor at the National Defense University in Washington—as expert an individual on civil-military relations as can be found—has important and troubling things to say about how we select our strategi ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Rolling Thunder For Memorial Day I thought it would be appropriate to hear the latest from Baghdad, and Tom Lasseter of Knight-Ridder was kind enough to talk with me. A first, btw, for EP in having a repeat guest. Tom's reporting from Baghdad has continued to earn him recognition, the latest being the Overseas Press Club's Hal Boyle Award, which was presented to him recently in NY by Brian Williams. Quite a prestigious award and well deserved. Plus which, the nice thing about Tom is that he's sincere in t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Coleen Rowley for Congress I hope that citizens in Minnesota's second district prudently exercise their obligations and elect Coleen Rowley to the US House of Representatives. On the issues she's solid. She may be a bit naïve about what she's up against, but then I reckon most Minnesotans are struggling to catch up, too. Other than that I believe she clearly has the potential to be a national leader. I can see, moreover, why the Democratic Party hasn't given a nickel to her campaign: she wants to talk about rea ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Mildest Rebuke When I saw a BBC report that as part of his Cabinet reshuffle Tony Blair had sacked his Minister for the Environment, Elliot Morley, and that Mr. Morley was taking a more skeptical position on civilian nuclear power, I thought it would be wonderful to get that view. To my surprise and delight Mr. Morley agreed to this interview, about which I'll note two things here. First, and I think it's a matter of style (style is policy I like to say), Mr. Morley's critique is so gentle one wonders, i ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ideas From An Old-Fashioned Progressive Though I admire Sam Smith for a lot of reasons, perhaps most of all it's because he reminds me of what I tell myself I want to be like. Not that he's entirely consistent in what he thinks—nor am I—and, anyhow, consistency is an over-rated virtue. What matters is his humanity. And I'm fascinated by what he's learned from decades of political activism at the grass-roots level. For those unfamiliar with Sam and his website, Progressive Review, I urge you to make a note of it and c ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Blue Plate Constitution Special The most economical and, in my best judgment, one truly necessary reform of the federal government would be to increase thenumber of members in the US House of Representatives. It wouldn't require, like term limits, any change to the Constitution—it just needs a simple majority vote. It isn't a new idea—it was done regularly on a routine basis until early in the last century. And other countries have managed to continue increasing the size of their legislative bodies up to the p ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Peace Practitioner Nobody got a better, close-up view of the collapse of the former Yugoslavia than the last Canadian Ambassador there, Joe Bissett. So when Ambassador Bissett talks about Yugoslavia, Milosevic, and the mistakes western governments made it is worth a careful listen, perhaps especially because international intervention in Yugoslavia became a template and point of departure for later adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. If you haven't got the fundamentals on the Yugoslav mess in roughly the righ ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Censure, Impeach, Indict If I had my druthers the Tyrant would be impeached, convicted in the Senate and removed from office, indicted as a private citizen on multiple felony charges, tried and found guilty, and sentenced to life in the big house without parole. "Pour encourager les autres." But to take things one at a time, here I talk with Elizabeth de la Vega, a former Federal Prosecutor (who writes frequently for TomDispatch), about prospects for censure and impeachment, and the latest on the Plame investigat ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Wake Up! Shredding an entire planet isn't just an act of stupidity. It isn't just being harsh. It isn't just an oversight. It's bloody-minded wickedness. Surely this crime is greater than all others? So when do we hold the perpetrators to account? A start would be in the November mid-term elections. To get some perspective on environmental issues I turned to Kelpie Wilson, the environmental editor for truthout. She writes widely on environmental subjects and her first novel, Primal Tears, has recen ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Les Folies ICTY The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has now spent over one billion dollars (and the meter's still running). As far as I can determine it has accomplished little except insofar as it has set back the idea of impartial, rules-based international justice by several decades. To parse out some of the ICTY's absurdities I talked with John Laughland, an extremely intelligent and well-spoken writer from the UK. We also talk about a few points of recent Yugoslav history. T ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cronies Although he was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Robert Bryce makes his home in Texas. He's put a lot of work into following the Texas money network, which he probably understands as well as anyone who's not a big time insider. In addition to two books, which look at that network from different perspectives, including its impact on the world outside Texas, he's written widely on a number of issues. In this conversation we talk about his recent trip to Saudi Arabia and Dubai, about oil supply, about ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Pete McCloskey for Congress Pete McCloskey, a former eight term member of Congress, is running again at age 78 in California's 11th district, in the Republican primary June 6 against incumbent Rep. Richard Pombo. McCloskey is an old-fashioned Republican (as opposed to the neo-Republicans) and would bring an important dose of honesty and honor to the House. Though he's the long-shot candidate, volunteers and enthusiasm may offset Pombo's money. There is also a procedure whereby Democrats may vote in the Republican pri ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Muslim Version of The NAACP Though it's probably about 100 times smaller the Muslim Public Affairs Council, if you set aside the group it represents, sounds exactly—to me—like the NAACP. MPAC is extremely centrist and moderate, committed to traditional American political values and practices, yet unswervingly devoted to justice. Its aim is the full integration of American Muslims into the system. Salam Al-Marayati, MPAC's Executive Director and one of its founders, is really on the front lines of the figh ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website More on Vote Theft, and The Big Picture It's a real pleasure talking with Dr. Dennis Loo, author of No Paper Trail Left Behind: The Theft of the 2004 Election. This paper has circulated quite widely on the internet but it has not, nor has the issue itself, gained any appreciable traction in the mainstream media or among the Democratic Party's (so-called) leadership—with a couple notable exceptions, such as Rep. John Conyers, Jr. To me this borders on being inexplicable, as Dr. Loo's arguments are entirely compelling and, i ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Imaginary Votes What do you call a country that allows its vote tabulating procedures—at all levels of elections, across many regions, and haphazardly—to be privatized such that no auditable recount is possible? A Democracy is not the word that springs to mind. Unauditable electronic voting is a relatively new phenomenon and, by and large, the American people have not yet cottoned on to its deadly implications. Some grassroots groups, however, have taken up the challenge and are making progres ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Bulldog in Baghdad If you can't get to Baghdad to look around, the next best thing is talking with someone who is actually there. Tom Lasseter is a foreign correspondent for Knight-Ridder, based in Baghdad. He's earned favorable comment on his reporting numerous times from Editor & Publisher, from many top weblogs, and in 2005 he won the John E. Drewry Award from the University of Georgia (his alma mater). A very decent guy. This conversation was recorded Saturday night; I'm posting it sans editing. Podcast ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website An Inside Job I must admit it's difficult for me, as a former bureaucrat, to imagine that people within the US government could pull off a successful conspiracy. On the other hand I cannot believe, much as I might like to, the standard account of 9/11. Perhaps the largest part of the problem in arguing for a conspiracy theory is that it takes a theory to beat a theory: here, a holistic account—who really did it? why did they do it? what's happened to all the inconvenient details, such as passengers ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nuclear Proliferation, Iran and the Green Renaissance I'd wanted to get the inside story on the nuclear dimension of our Iran crisis, which I did, but in the bargain I got a crash course on why nuclear power will save the planet. Ambassador John Ritch, a West Point graduate, now the Director General of the World Nuclear Association, is about as experienced a practitioner in nuclear proliferation and nuclear issues writ broad as anyone. He's also a leading nuclear evangelist. In addition to being a first-rate intellect he's one of the nicest g ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website An Independent Mind A few people (sometimes it seems like a small minority) have a temperament that looks first to facts to draw conclusions, not to preconceptions. Dr. Paul Craig Roberts epitomizes such a mind, expressing it in the rarest fashion, as a genuine, prolific polymath. Yet, paradoxically, I suspect that Dr. Roberts' common-sense observations will be shared by a large number of people, perhaps even – if I can lift the phrase – a silent majority. Dr. Roberts is a Research Fellow at th ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website World Oil Disruptions 101 Guy Caruso, currently the Administrator of the Energy Information Administration, an independent statistical and analytic branch of the Department of Energy, is essentially the Federal Government's top energy economist. He's been in and out of government working on energy issues for about forty years, he's extremely knowledgeable, he's as savvy a bureaucrat as they make them, and – I've always envied this particular ability – he's got a perfect poker face. Guy was extremely gene ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website "I Have A Dream" As a public service on Martin Luther King Day we're making available his memorable "I Have A Dream" speech, one of the finest speeches ever made. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Conversation with William Odom Lieutenant General William E. Odom (ret.) formerly was Director of the NSA, from 1985-88. He is now a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute (in Washington DC) and a Professor at Yale University. General Odom has expressed the remarkable view that the war in Iraq is the greatest strategic blunder the US has ever made. In this conversation he elaborates on that proposition, gives a virtuoso tour d'horizon of US foreign policy, talks about the political dilemma we currently face at home, and t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Interview with Ray McGovern This is our first podcast here at EP. Not quite a full production, but out of Beta – one for the historical archives! Ray McGovern had a 27-year career with the CIA as an analyst, spanning the administrations of JFK to GHW Bush. His duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President's Daily Brief (PDB). During the mid-eighties, Ray was one of the senior analysts conducting early morning briefings of the PDB one-on-one with the Vice President, the Secr ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Kennedy by Comparison Kennedy's speech (see below) inspired me to consider some of the many differences between his politics and politics today. So, I thought, why not do a running commentary with clips from that speech, as a kind of conversation? This is a first test podcast, if you will -- and there'll be several more test podcasts before the elves at Electric Politics settle on the right method(s) of doing this. Listen. Enjoy.Oh, and while we're wondering how JFK would have thought about things modern, you sh ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Forgotten JFK Speech Not a podcast, but as we test-build the site I thought I'd provide an internal link to a fantastic speech John F. Kennedy gave at American University, June 10, 1963. A couple selected passages:"I have, therefore, chosen this time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth too rarely perceived. And that is the most important topic on earth: peace. What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world b ... 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