Mike Gravel (D)
| Campaign Website | http://www.gravel2008.us/ |
| Political Base Page | http://www.politicalbase.com/people/mike-gravel/2632/ |
| Net Neutrality | In favor of net neutrality |
| Immigration and H1B Visas | In favor of eliminating quotas and opening borders |
| Taxes & Internet Taxes | Believes that there should be no involvement at all of the government in the use of the internet, and that it should be free; supports national sales tax |
| Technology Education | "Well first off No Child Left Behind is essentially founded on political cosmetic rhetoric. Teaching to the test is not teaching, you need a broader spectrum than that. Secondly, when you have a national education system where 1/3 of our children do not graduate from high school, you can focus on engineering and those things but my god the whole country is on a way to a disaster and this isn't something that happened the last six years, this is something that has been going on the last forty years." |
| Digital Divide | "Here again, the educational establishment should totally erase any divide. Obviously the internet is becoming ubiquitous and we should capitalize on that by getting the necessary hardware into all educational institutions and private organizations should focus on this. There shouldn't be a child in this country that should not have the ability to have a computer at a very young age. Here again these are policies that should be implemented and thank god there are some institutions, I think Microsoft, Dell and other people in the field have programs that try and bring about expansion in this regard. It is not enough. We need a national program to eliminate the divide not only for children but for adults and Middle America who are not totally attuned to the technology. Here I am a person in my 70's and I had the good fortune that when I left Congress, talking to a person at a university who advised me to become computer literate or I would not be able to compete in the world, and I did make myself computer literate and I've enjoyed the benefits of that literacy ever since." |
| Identity Theft | "There are many areas where I'm not that keen to expand government police powers. Obviously the private sector can do a lot with these security systems coming forth very rapidly with new iterations and you get it all the time whether its McAfee or others that tell you here just upload this and keep yourself current. Well that is fine but I think that we need the punishment situation." |
| Mobile Spectrum Auction | "I would force open access on all of them and retroactively on what has been granted. That whole area has to be re-examined whether it's the spectrum for cell phones, for the internet, for networks, for television, all of that. All of that has to be re-examined. Our communications systems, except with the advent of the internet, have been in the toilet." |
| China | "What we should do is we should pass a law not letting American companies give out private information to China and countries that are committing human rights abuses." |
| Intellectual Property | "I don't know enough about the whole copyright issue, I truly don't." |
| Renewable Energy | In response to the question "What do you want to do about renewable energy and how can the government promote renewable energy science?": "There's a lot of things the government can do. One of the first and foremost is to get the hell out of the way and let some of these forces be released. The first and foremost thing is to stop the subsidies...The higher the price [of oil] can rise the sooner you’ll get alternative forms of energy. In fact I am very much … and would work to institute a tax on carbon and then I would take that tax, pool that money, and bring in other counties in the world to tax their people on carbon so that we could take these pooled resources and integrate the global engineering and scientific community to get us off of carbon in a decade. And we can do it, we truly can do it." |
| Other | Gravel wants to empower the American people to become lawmakers with the help of the internet. He has written something called the "National Initiative", a federal ballot initiative that would equip people with a direct power of lawmaking. |
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