News


  • The Far Left’s War on Direct Democracy
  • A total of 24 states allow voters to change laws on their own by collecting signatures and putting initiatives on the ballot. It's healthy that the entrenched political class should face some real legislative competition from initiative-toting citizens. Unfortunately, some special interests have declared war on the initiative process, using tactics ranging from restrictive laws to outright thuggery. Read the Rest...

  • Q&A with Mike Gravel
  • When Mike Gravel appeared on camera during the early Democratic primary debates, Americans began asking who this blunt-speaking, wisecracking individual was and what qualified him to stand beside Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other, younger hopefuls. He soon reminded the nation that as a two-term Alaska senator (1969-1981), he released the Pentagon Papers—the government’s secret history of the Vietnam War. His was the era of dirty Nixon politics, global instability and OPEC oil shocks. Read the Rest...

  • Former Senator Mike Gravel Calls for Independent 9/11 Investigation and Prosecution of President Bush and Vice President Cheney
  • The former Democratic senator from Alaska discusses his presidential campaign, his role in the releasing of the Pentagon Papers and his support for NYC 9/11 Ballot Initiative Campaign, a grassroots group seeking to place an initiative on the ballot of the November 6th general election allowing registered New York City voters to create a new commission to investigate 9/11. Read the Rest...

  • Irish Vote on Lisbon Treaty Energizes Senator Gravel’s Democracy Foundation
  • Former U.S. Senator Mike Gravel has been working for a national initiative process for the United States for many years. See www.nationalinitiative.us for more about this project. Gravel’s recent campaign for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination helped publicize his goal, at least among Libertarians and others who followed the party’s presidential contest this year. Read the Rest...

  • More Like Cicero Than Quixote: The People’s Crusade of Mike Gravel
  • Like a fresh wind coming down from Alaska--the state he represented as a U.S. Senator from 1969--1981, Mike Gravel is determined to start a debate about the fundamentals of democracy in his quest for the Democratic Party's nomination for President. Read the Rest...

  • Oregon’s public initiative plan should spur federal model
  • Over the last 11 months, CNN/Opinion Research Polls have found that more than 60 percent of adults nationwide oppose the war in Iraq. Yet, the war continues. This is an overt instance of the government ignoring majority opinion. Since 2001, more than 55 percent of adults nationwide have favored the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. Yet, the Kyoto Protocol remains un-ratified at the federal level. Sadly, it is not difficult to find many instances of the federal government ignoring majority opinion. Read the Rest...

  • Clean energy initiative submits signatures for 2008 ballot
  • Press Release, May 4, 2008 By Jim Kottmeyer Read the Rest...

  • Voting as a way of life
  • “FORTUNATE events have put me at the head of the French government, but I would consider myself incapable of governing the Swiss,” Napoleon Bonaparte told a Swiss delegation in 1802. “The more I think about your country, the more convinced I become that the disparity between its constituent parts makes it impossible to impose a common pattern on it: everything points to federalism.” Read the Rest...

  • Something to be proud of
  • “WHY SWITZERLAND?”, asked an excellent book by Jonathan Steinberg, an academic at Britain's Cambridge University, first published several decades ago and since updated. It is still a good question, and not as straightforward as it appears at first sight. It can be read, among other things, as asking how Switzerland has become the way it is; whether its ancient and peculiar political and economic arrangements still make sense today; and, if they do, whether other countries might have anything to learn from them. Read the Rest...

  • Power to the people
  • IN THE early, heady days of the internet, many of its most zealous proponents expected cyberspace to transform the political landscape. Autocratic governments, they thought, would be scuppered by their inability to control the free flow of information. That could yet happen (see article). But cyber-optimists' hopes were even higher for established democracies, where they saw the internet restoring the electorate's civic engagement. Citizens would no longer have to rely on information spoon-fed by politicians, but be able to find out for themselves. Read the Rest...