Tell Somebody

The June 12, 2014 edition of Tell Somebody begins with a little conversation with three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee Kathy Kelly who was in Kansas City and surrounding areas for the 2014 events of Trifecta Resista, a Kansas City based coalition of groups supporting Chelsea Manning, imprisoned in Leavenworth Kansas, and opposing nuclear weapons parts production in Kansas City and drone warfare operations at Whiteman AFB.  On Saturday May 31, I caught up with Kelly at the entrance to the Kansas City nuclear weapons parts plant at the Bannister Federal Complex as a bus was loading to take protestors to another gathering at the DeLasalle education center. The rest of the show covers June 4, 2014 protests against a proposed Kansas City, Missouri ordinance regulating food sharing that is favored by a couple of the bigger homeless shelters and opposed by a number of individuals and organization that feed the homeless.  Audio from the protest near city hall and a conversation with homeless advocate Richard Tripp ar

On June 5, 2014, Mary Lindsay of KC MoveToAmend was in the KKFI studio and MoveToAmend  co-founder and spokesperson David Cobb was on the phone to talk about the need to overturn Citizens United, the bizarre legal fiction of corporate personhood and the strange idea that money equals speech.  This was a pledge drive show, so they also related all of that to the need to support KKFI and Tell Somebody. Click on the pod icon above, or the .mp3 filename below to listen to the show, or right-click and choose "save target as" or "save link as" to save a copy of the audio file to your computer. You can also subscribe to the podcast, for free, at the iTunes store  or other podcast directory.   If you have any comments or questions on the show, or problems accessing the files, send an email to mail@tellsomebody.us. Follow Tell Somebody  on Twitter: @tellsomebodynow.   “Like” the Tell Somebody page on facebook:  www.facebook.com/TellSomebodyNow

The May 29, 2014 edition of Tell Somebody featured a conversation with independent journalist, historian and policy advisor Paul Street. Among other books, Street is the author Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics(2008), and They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy  (2014) Click on the pod icon above, or the .mp3 filename below to listen to the show, or right-click and choose "save target as" or "save link as" to save a copy of the audio file to your computer. You can also subscribe to the podcast, for free, at the iTunes store  or other podcast directory. If you have any comments or questions on the show, or problems accessing the files, send an email to mail@tellsomebody.us. Follow Tell Somebody  on Twitter: @tellsomebodynow. “Like” the Tell Somebody page on facebook:  www.facebook.com/TellSomebodyNow  

Peaceworks KC board member Jane Stoever got on the phone for the May 22, 2014 edition of Tell Somebody  to talk about the 2014 Trifecta Resista events coordinated by a Kansas City-based coalition of organizations advocating for the release of Chelsea Manning, the end of nuclear weapons proliferation and a halt to illegal drone wars. Much of the rest of the show was given over to a rebroadcast of part of a conversation I recorded with independent journalist and policy advisor Paul Street shortly before Barack Obama’s first inauguration as president of the United States.  Street had recently published Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics, and especially now in hindsight Street’s observations are so ‘spot on’ that I thought this interview was worth another hearing before having Street on again for the May 29, 2014 show. Click on the pod icon above, or the .mp3 filename below to listen to the show, or right-click and choose "save target as" or "save link as" to save a copy of the audio file to your c

On the May 15, 2014 edition of Tell Somebody, guest John Nichols talked about Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex  is Destroying America, one week ahead of an appearance in Kansas City to talk about the book.     Nichols, Washington correspondent for the Nation Magazine, co-founder of the media reform organization Free Press, and co-author with Robert McChesney of “Dollarocracy,” is coming to speak at the downtown central Library in Kansas City, MO next Thursday May 22.   Click on the pod icon above, or the .mp3 filename below to listen to the show, or right-click and choose "save target as" or "save link as" to save a copy of the audio file to your computer.  You can also subscribe to the podcast, for free, at the iTunes store  or other podcast directory. If you have any comments or questions on the show, or problems accessing the files, send an email to mail@tellsomebody.us.  Follow Tell Somebody  on Twitter: @tellsomebodynow.                                                            

One the May 1, 2014 edition of Tell Somebody, guest Christine Hines, consumer and civil justice counsel with Public Citizen, talked about how forced arbitration, which denies the people their right to sue when harmed, is spreading like a poison through industries that provide products and services to consumers, and is increasingly being added to corporate contracts with employees. We filled out the show with an extended clip of 2004 Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb’s remarks in Kansas City on April 22 about the need to amend the US Constitution to overturn the legal fiction of ‘corporate personhood’ and the idea that money equals speech.   Click on the pod icon above, or the .mp3 filename below to listen to the show, or right-click and choose "save target as" or "save link as" to save a copy of the audio file to your computer.   You can also subscribe to the podcast, for free, at the iTunes store  or other podcast directory. If you have any comments or questions on the show, or problems acc

On the April 24, 2014 edition of Tell Somebody, we heard from Dr. Vandana Shiva, longtime peace activist Brian Terrell, and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern. Author and ecological activist Dr. Shiva made some brief remarks at a dinner a day after speaking at Unity Temple on the Plaza in Kansas City on April 17, an event broadcast live on 90.1 FM KKFI Community Radio.  In her dinner remarks, she talked about the worship of cow dung, recalled receiving an “award” from a Monsanto PR flack, and explained how people can respond at a planetary scale through local action. Brian Terrell returned to Whiteman Air Force Base, the site of his 2012 arrest resulting in a 6 month prison sentence for trying to deliver an indictment to the base commander.  Terrell talked about B-2 bombers, and the irony of how drone warfare, ostensibly intended to keep war at a distance, actually brings it closer. Ray McGovern also spoke at Whiteman AFB, starting out by calling Brian Terrell a prophet.  McGovern talked about the silence of th

David Cobb, 2004 Green Party Presidential nominee and current Move To Amend spokesman will be speaking in Springfield MO on April 21, 2014 before coming to Kansas City on April 22. Both are stops on the 2014 Barnstorming Tour, “Challenging Corporate Power & Creating Democracy.”  Cobb got on the phone with Tell Someboy for the April 10th edition of the showto talk about the upcoming Kansas City talk and the need to amend the U.S. Constitution to overturn the ‘corpporate personhood” and the concept of money equaling speech.  Click on the pod icon above, or the .mp3 filename below to listen to the show, or right-click and choose "save target as" or "save link as" to save a copy of the audio file to your computer.  You can also subscribe to the podcast, for free, at the iTunes store  or other podcast directory. If you have any comments or questions on the show, or problems accessing the files, send an email to mail@tellsomebody.us. Follow Tell Somebody  on Twitter: @tellsomebodynow. “Like” the Tell Somebody

Since first speaking with her on the phone for a segment about water privatization on the Heartland Labor Forum in 2003, I have been hoping Dr. Vandana Shiva would someday make it to Kansas City. So I was delighted to read a couple of months ago that Cultivate Kansas City was partnering with UMKC to host a 2-day visit by Dr. Vandana Shiva on Thursday, April 17 and Friday, April 18, 2014.  There is more information on this at www.cultivatekc.org, and on a facebook event page titled  “Dr. Vandana Shiva "Cultivating Diversity, Freedom and Hope" Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned physicist, feminist, activist and author.  Her many books include Water Wars, Soil Not Oil and Making Peace with the Earth. I called her in Delhi, India and recorded a conversation broadcast on Tell Somebody on April 3, 2014.   Click on the pod icon above, or the .mp3 filename below to listen to the show, or right-click and choose "save target as" or "save link as" to save a copy of the audio file to your computer.  You can also subscri

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern kicked off a trip to Missouri with a stop at the KKFI studios on March 27, 2014 to share some of his thoughts on goings-on in Ukraine and to talk about his recent trips to England, Netherlands, and the National Press Club and the State Department in Washington. McGovern’s current trip will take him all over Missouri, with quick stops in Lawrence, KS and Fayetteville, AR, culminating in talk at the Plaza Branch of the Kansas City Public Library on Monday, April 7 at 6:30pm.  That presentation is billed as “Speaking Truth to Power.”  (You can RSVP for that *here*).  Click on the pod icon above, or the .mp3 filename below to listen to the show, or right-click and choose "save target as" or "save link as" to save a copy of the audio file to your computer. You can also subscribe to the podcast, for free, at the iTunes store  or other podcast directory. If you have any comments or questions on the show, or problems accessing the files, send an email to mail@tellsomebody.us. Follow T

Care of Poor People, Inc. (www.coppinc.com) is holding the 2014 Spring Break for the Homeless at the Scottish Rite Temple near Linwood and Paseo in Kansas City, MO on April 19.  Author, former homeless cab driver and COPP Inc. founder Richard Tripp stopped by to talk about the upcoming event on the March 20 show.    While this is a local Kansas City event, Richard Tripp’s story and his approach to helping the homeless have a more universal appeal.  You might want to read his autobiography, Please Underestimate Me,, available via a link at www.coppinc.com, or at Amazon.com:  http://www.amazon.com/Please-Underestimate-Me-Blood-Richard/dp/0595442102   Click on the pod icon above, or the .mp3 filename below to listen to the show, or right-click and choose "save target as" or "save link as" to save a copy of the audio file to your computer. You can also subscribe to the podcast, for free, at the iTunes store  or other podcast directory. If you have any comments or questions on the show, or problems accessing the

A February 13, 2014 Comcast press release announced “Time Warner Cable to Merge with Comcast Corporation to Create a World-Class Technology and Media Company” and went on to say “Strategic Combination Will Accelerate Delivery of Comcast’s Technologically Advanced Products and Services to Time Warner Cable’s Customers,” and “Transaction Creates Multiple Pro-Consumer and Pro-Competitive Benefits.” Outside the Comcast and Time Warner corporate offices, there were different characterizations of what would result if the biggest cable company merged with the second biggest. On the March 6, 2014 edition of Tell Somebody, Matt Wood, Policy Director with Free Press got on the phone to talk about some of the issues related to this proposed merger.  Click on the pod icon above, or the .mp3 filename below to listen to the show, or right-click and choose "save target as" or "save link as" to save a copy of the audio file to your computer. You can also subscribe to the podcast, for free, at the iTunes store  or other podc

Attorney and journalist Dave Saldana is the producer and director of the new Center for Media and Democracy film Keystone PipeLIES Exposed, about the Keystone KXL pipeline, and he talks about it in the first half of the February 27, 2014 edition of Tell Somebody.     In the second half of the show, University of Nebraska Economics Professor Hank van den Berg returns to talk about the mostly secret proposed so-called “free trade” agreement known as TPP.   Click on the pod icon above, or the .mp3 filename below to listen to the show, or right-click and choose "save target as" or "save link as" to save a copy of the audio file to your computer. You can also subscribe to the podcast, for free, at the iTunes store  or other podcast directory. If you have any comments or questions on the show, or problems accessing the files, send an email to mail@tellsomebody.us. Follow Tell Somebody  on Twitter: @tellsomebodynow.   “Like” the Tell Somebody page on facebook: www.facebook.com/TellSomebodyNow

On Tell Somebodyon February 20, 2014, the main topic was McCutcheon v FEC, the Supreme Court case described as worse than Citizens United in terms of possible impact on money in elections. Public Citizen Senior Organizer Aquene Freechild talked about same-day events being planned all over the country to respond to a decision being handed down in the McCutcheon case, which could be as early as Monday, February 24.  After that, we heard audio clips from the oral arguments in the case heard In October, 2013.   But first, news from the Oxford Union in England, hosting an event just the night before the broadcast honoring Chelsea Manning, 2014 recipient of the Sam Adams award for Integrity in Intelligence.  Tell Somebodyplayed audio from 2013 Sam Adams awardee Edward Snowden, who appeared at the Oxford Union via video stream from Moscow.  Also, word of a lawsuit filed against the U.S. State Department on behalf of Ray McGovern, and Kansas City nuclear weapons parts plant cleanup Community Advisory Panel news.   C

Recently Todd O’Boyle of Common Cause brought my attention to a Kansas Senate bill, authored by a cable industry lobbyist, which would outlaw community broadband in Kansas.  Subsequently I came across an article online written by O’Boyle’s colleague Christopher Mitchell who wrote that the bill in question, if passed, would create some of the most draconian limits on building networks that we have seen in any state.   On  Tell Somebody  on February 13, 2014, Todd O’Boyle and Christopher Mitchell came on the air to talk about community broadband and industry efforts in Kansas and across the country to outlaw it.   Todd O’Boyle is  Common Cause’s Program Director for Media and Democracy.  He joined Common Cause in September 2012 and is responsible for research, advocacy, and strategy for media reform.    Christopher Mitchell is the Director of the Telecommunications as Commons Initiative with the New Rules Project of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.   Click on the pod icon above, or the .mp3 filename below

On the January 2, 2014 edition of Tell Somebody,  we hear from Dr. Ed Weisbart on single payer healthcare.  Dr. Weisbart of St. Louis was in Kansas City in December for several speaking engagements including a presentation at the School of Medicine at the University of Missouri Kansas City on the theme of  “Health Care Reform: What’s Here? What’s Coming? What’s Missing?”    Dr. Ed Weisbart is a family physician who practiced at Rush Medical Center in Chicago for 20 years before moving to St. Louis in 2003 to become chief medical officer at Express Scripts, a Fortune 100 Company. After retiring from that position in 2010, he began organizing the St. Louis chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program, which he currently chairs. He volunteers in a variety of safety-net clinics in the St. Louis area, and is also assistant professor of clinical medicine at Washington University in St. Louis.  He has had several articles published in national medical journals regarding the health care needs of the uninsured,

On the December 26, 2013 edition of Tell Somebody,  in the midst of conflicting Federal Court decisions about NSA practices and some very interesting mainstream media print and broadcast pieces, Ray McGovern returned to the show to talk about Edward Snowden, Michael Hayden, Bobby Ray Inman, the Constitution, the NSA, and more as only he can.  Click on the pod icon above, or the .mp3 filename below to listen to the show, or right-click and choose "save target as" or "save link as" to save a copy of the audio file to your computer. You can also subscribe to the podcast, for free, at the iTunes store  or other podcast directory. If you have any comments or questions on the show, or problems accessing the files, send an email to mail@tellsomebody.us. Follow Tell Somebody  on Twitter: @tellsomebodynow. “Like” the Tell Somebody page on facebook: www.facebook.com/TellSomebodyNow

On the December 19, 2013 edition of Tell Somebody,  Danny Schechter, the News Dissector, returned to talk about his new book about Nelson Mandela.  “Danny Schechter has produced and directed six documentary films about Nelson Mandela and was the only American documentary filmmaker Mandela trusted to be part of his team in the United States and in South Aftrica after his release and his election as South Africa’s president.”  Click on the pod icon above, or the .mp3 filename below to listen to the show, or right-click and choose "save target as" or "save link as" to save a copy of the audio file to your computer. You can also subscribe to the podcast, for free, at the iTunes store  or other podcast directory. If you have any comments or questions on the show, or problems accessing the files, send an email to mail@tellsomebody.us. Follow Tell Somebody  on Twitter: @tellsomebodynow.   “Like” the Tell Somebody page on facebook: www.facebook.com/TellSomebodyNow

On the December 12, 2013 edition of Tell Somebody, Professor Jim White, Director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and a professor of Geological Sciences and Environmental Studies talked about climate change. He chaired the committee within the National Academy of Sciences that released a report last week entitled Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change. The report brought to the fore the sudden changes that can occur within our biosphere in a matter of mere years or decades–a red alert for all of us sharing Planet Earth which emphasizes the need for an early warning system to be implemented. Click on the pod icon above, or the .mp3 filename below to listen to the show, or right-click and choose "save target as" or "save link as" to save a copy of the audio file to your computer. You can also subscribe to the podcast, for free, at the iTunes store  or other podcast directory. If you have any comments or questions on the show, or problems accessing the files, send an email to mail@tellsomebody.us. Follo

On the main segment of the December 5, 2013 edition of Tell Somebody, Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines division, talked about a recent Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) revelation. A November 13, 2013 Public Citizen Press Release announced that a complete chapter of secret TPP text revealing that the Obama administration is demanding terms that would limit Internet freedom and access to lifesaving medicines throughout the Asia-Pacific region was released by WikiLeaks. Maybarduk’s division analyzed the leaked TPP documents for WikiLeaks. Listen to a discussion with Maybarduk after segments with Gina Chiala of Stand Up KC , on a fast food worker strike, and voices from Richard Tripp’s Care of Poor People Survival 13 event for the homeless on November 30. Click on the pod icon above, or the .mp3 filename below to listen to the show, or right-click and choose "save target as" or "save link as" to save a copy of the audio file to your computer. You can also subscribe to the podcast,