Margrete Strand Rangnes: Democracy Awakening Actions Demand Reforms to Rein in Big Money's Influence in U.S. Politics

Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.

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The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement

"The man who predicted Trump presidential win now says Trump impeachment could happen," AM Joy with Joy Reid, MSNBC, Jan. 21, 2018
"Sketchy Kazakh money finds its way into Trump dealings," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Red flags seen in many Trump real estate deals," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown Buyers," BuzzFeed, Jan. 12, 2018
"The Scandals of Donald Trump: Presidential Edition," The Atlantic, May 15, 2017
"Here's what we know so far about Team Trump's ties to Russian interests," Washington Post's ongoing compilation
"What Comey Was Investigating, Explained," The Moscow Project, Center for American Progress

"Donald Trump's Financial Ties to Russian Oligarchs and Mobsters Detailed In Explosive New Documentary from the Netherlands," Dutch TV documentary, Alternet.org, May 12, 2017
Ongoing compilation of Trump's creeping authoritarianism," MotherJones.com
Full resource list ...

SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris

SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018

Jen Siskind Jennifer Siskind, local coordinator for Food and Water Watch, describes the campaign to stop fracking waste in Connecticut, which so far has led to fracking waste bans in 34 towns around the state. Interviewed by Richard Hill on Mic Check, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT

SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018

Lindsay Kanaly The panel discusses Trump's long history of racism and the Republican voter suppression juggernaut confronting Democrats leading up to the 2018 elections. Special guest: Lindsay Kanaly, a lead organizer of the Women's Marches planned for Jan. 20, 2018. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill on Resistance Roundtable, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT.

SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018

Richard Wolff, Economics professor Richard Wolff declares U.S. capitalism to be beyond repair and suggests the need for a radical alternative. Interviewed by Richard Hill

SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017

Maryn McKenna, investigative journalist and author of Big Chicken, talks about the widespread use and dangers of antibiotics in commercial poultry, beef and fruit production. Interview by Bill Duesing, Richard Hill and Guy Beardsly on WPKN's Organic Farm Stand.

SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017

Nina Turner, president of Our Revolution, talks about the fight ahead for progressives as she receives the Working Families Organization Award for Exceptional Leadership Towards Advancing Progress. The event was held in Meriden, CT. Produced by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017

Working Families Party of CT talks strategy and issues for 2018.
Lindsay Farrell, executive director of the Working Families Party of Connecticut, discusses the state's electoral landscape and lays out the issues and strategies that could lead to progressive victories in 2018. Interviewed by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017

Disturbing developments in the Trump/Republican Agenda
Focus on the tax bill, destruction of our public lands, North Korea and Trump's private CIA. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill. Special guest: Jo Macallero of Rise and Resist.

SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017

Professor Timothy Snyder, author of the highly acclaimed resistance manual On Tyranny, discusses his book and offers a fresh assessment of the state of our beleaguered republic. Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale, is introduced by Stanley Heller, administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace, a Connecticut-based organization that sponsored this event at the United Church Parish House in New Haven on Nov. 28. A brief interview with Snyder conducted by WPKN radio producer, Richard Hill, follows his talk.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017

Lynne Ide, director of program and policy with the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, talks about the current state of health care coverage in Connecticut. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017

Focus on the Republican tax plan, the just-released autopsy on the Democratic Party, and Internet censorship by Google, Facebook and Youtube. Including an interview with Hilary Grant, a lead organizer with Action Together Connecticut, who discusses the local results of the recent election, with hosts Richard Hill, Scott Harris and Ruth Baumgartner WPKN producers

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Two leaders from Redneck Revolt, an anti-racist, anti-capitalist movement, talk about their work organizing with white working class people in Suffolk County, New York. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, describes the extent of -- and motives underlying -- the vast US network of military bases around the globe. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017

Joyakol, South Korean peace activist and singer, discusses the crisis on the Korean peninsula and focuses on the resistance to the U.S. huge military base being constructed on Jeju Island. The event was sponsored by the Greater New Haven Peace Council and this audio was recorded by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.
Joyakol discusses Americans' biggest misconceptions about the conflict between North and South Korea and the U.S., Interview by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.

SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven

John Allen, founding director of the New Haven Pride Center, Connecticut, talks about his new LGBTQ television show, Out in New Haven, which presents a range of political and cultural issues to the community. Interviewed by Richard Hill on WPKN's Rainy Day Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2018.

2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.

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THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

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Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.

Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

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Democracy Awakening Actions Demand Reforms to Rein in Big Money's Influence in U.S. Politics

Posted April 13, 2016

Interview with Margrete Strand Rangnes, executive vice president, Public Citizen, conducted by Scott Harris

With the almost daily bombast and insults emanating from Republican presidential candidate and real estate billionaire Donald Trump, the 2016 election campaign has been more a source of crude media entertainment than an informed national debate about public policy and the future of the country. But while cable news channels and other commercial media outlets trip over themselves to fill the airwaves with Trump content to cash in on ratings-driven profits, the American people have come to believe that the U.S. political system is broken.

In a recent public opinion poll conducted by Gallup in March of this year, some 66 percent of those surveyed believe that the U.S. presidential election process is dysfunctional and in need of repair. One major factor contributing to Americans' loss of faith in the nation's machinery of democracy is an overwhelming bipartisan rejection of the 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United decision, that opened the floodgates of unlimited and unaccountable money in U.S. politics, where a handful of billionaires now have unchecked power to influence election outcomes.

With so much disgust at the way U.S. politics is run and the 2016 election campaign on track to be the most expensive in U.S. history, a coalition of more than 260 groups are supporting a series of protests in Washington, D.C. called Democracy Spring and Democracy Awakening April 11 to 18. The activists are demanding voting rights reforms, the overturning of Citizens United and the filling of the U.S. Supreme Court vacancy. The actions, which kicked off on April 2 with a march from Philadelphia to Washington, will include teach-ins, rallies, and will culminate on April 18 with mass civil disobedience at the U.S. Capitol building. Between The Lines' Scott Harris spoke with Margrete Strand Rangnes, Public Citizen's executive vice president, a Democracy Awakening coalition partner who talks about the corrupting influence of big money in U.S. politics and the goals of the Democracy Awakening protest.

MARGRETE STRAND RANGNES: A lot of things are happening right now. A lot of excitement, lots of grassroots people. I was up at the rally today. People had flown in from Denver and Seattle, so pretty much every state being represented. We're expecting thousands of people here this coming weekend. And it's pretty exciting. We're coming together on three demands that are sort of core to our democracy. Get Big Money out of politics, restore voting rights and have a vote on the Supreme Court nominee. Our website is DemocracyAwakening.org, which has a lot of information about what's being planned.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Tell us a little bit about what ties all these issues together confronting the failure of U.S. politics to address key issues, the machinery of elections which a lot of people feel is suspect or a failed project in many respects, as well as the economy, which is failing most people. All these things seem to be linked in my mind – maybe many of our listeners minds' – and that I think is one of the major elements of bringing all these groups together that you've put together here in this week of actions.

MARGRETE STRAND RANGNES: At the bottom of what we're trying to do, whether you care about climate change or whether or you're fighting for your union and whether you are talking about health care, immigration, more people are starting to see that we cannot make progress on those issues when the system is rigged in the way it is right now, where the very wealthy pour unlimited amounts of money into the political system. We're going backward on voting rights and where we have a Congress that is completely broken at this point, the point of obstructions that we see now happening around the Supreme Court, and so forth. And we're left with this election cycle that is reduced to a pretty meaningless discussion oftentimes.

I think what we're trying to do is bring some of these issues back into the front. You know, we at Public Citizen did a report earlier this week talking about how none of the debates in the presidential race has there been a conversation about money in politics. What would you as a candidate do about Citizen United? How do you see the role of money playing? how can we make change? None of those questions were coming up. The fact that people's right to vote is being jeopardized, all of these questions are not being talked about. And that's what we feel are the important underpinnings of everything that we try to do. We have 270 organizations that are part of Democracy Awakening, from all the spectrums of different issues. Why? Because we have to deal these issues to make progress in any of the other things that we're working on. So that's part of what's exciting with the thousands of people that'll be coming with all of these groups working together. It's really creating a movement for some of these very fundamental issues that we have to address.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Tell us about some of the varied organizations and types of groups that are involved in the coalition that's put Democracy Awakening together.

MARGRETE STRAND RANGNES: It's anything from big unions like the AFL-CIO and the SEIU, to smaller groups. Jim Hightower is going be there, Friends of the Sierra Club. We have Southern Illinois People for Progress. I'm just looking at the website. There's a really great mix – the NAACP, Common Cause, Public Citizen. It's a big mix of both small and large, national and local, from every kind of issue area that you can sort of imagine that's coming together, and it's all listed on our website.

Part of what's exciting you know is that these are all groups that don't necessarily work on these issues as their core issue. You know, if you were in the Sierra Club you wake up in the morning and you want to address climate change. But now they're not able to really do that, and I think that the fact that large organization are starting to see that we also need to work on money in politics, you also need to work on voting rights if we're going to have an impact on climate. That's what you see reflected in these 270 groups that are participating.

BETWEEN THE LINES: As you look at electoral politics in this country, and how change is made in our own history and history around the world – it seems pretty clear that movements make change and elections rarely make change. That's my view anyway. What's your perspective on building a movement and its importance to make the changes that our elections often aren't capable of doing?

MARGRETE STRAND RANGNES: I completely agree with you and part of what I think is exciting about people coming together in Washington this weekend is not that there is a protest in D.C. What I think is exciting is that it is actually genuinely building on a movement that had been growing around the country for years. This is one of the ground (unintelligible) that are building your coalition, you're getting more and more people engaged, you're creating that nationally, you're take it out around the country. People on the ground are moving things forward and that does lead to change.

For more information, visit Democracy Awakening at democracyawakening.org on Facebook facebook.com/Democracy-Awakening-957368101008769/ and democracyspring.org/ and on Facebook at facebook.com/democracyspring/ and Twitter at #DemocracySpring; 99rise.org.