Raptorial has been around in one form or another since 1987. It has existed as a print 'zine distributed in Seattle, WA and Boulder, CO (Raptorial Press) and as a production company "umbrella" -- so-to-speak -- for film/video/spoken word projects (Raptorial Productions). In Spring of 2000, it re-surfaced briefly as a print 'zine (Raptorial Reader) in Seattle. Raptorial Media has been online since 1995.

To put it as modestly as possible, Raptorial is an ongoing independent media organization comprised of individuals who call things as they see them. We are immensely frustrated with the way things are in the United States. The richest nation on the planet is also among the stupidest.

Anyone who has spent significant time outside of the U.S. knows how some nations have more or less resolved many of the social ills we still argue about (year after year after year...) here in the U.S. of A. America is no longer the envy of the world (if indeed it ever was) and continuously fails to draw from the wisdom of its neighbors and allies. For example:

Want to improve your healthcare system? Simple, ask Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan or most of the nations in the European community how they are taking 100% care of their citizen's health needs and are not enslaved by greedy insurance companies.

Want to strengthen your education system? Easy, make sure your military budget never exceeds your education budget. Of all the civilized western democracies, only the US spends disproportionately more money on bombs than it spends on school books. Ask any of those other nations how they manage to keep their enemies at bay (spending next to nothing on defense) while simultaneously producing some of the brightest thinkers on Earth. I guess this begs the question: "Which came first, the educated populace or the low military budget?"

Is your war against drugs an abysmal Billion dollar failure? No problem, treat drug abuse like a health issue instead of a criminal concern and learn to tolerate adults who choose to use drugs recreationally (ie, moderately)... as they are learning to do in Canada, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands.

Instead of honestly learning from the world's various ongoing socio-political experiments, the United States arrogantly adheres to the notion that it has the best political system in the world. What is it that Americans think they have to teach the rest of the world, anyway? How to watch TV more and vote in elections less? How to rot your teeth by drinking soda pop or how to smoke cigarettes until your lungs turn black and stop working?

One of the things that Raptorial is here to do (in unofficial conjunction with hundreds of other progressive voices attempting the same) is help end America's delusion of grandeur anyway it can. No small task is this.

Do you realize there has not been a progressive reform in the United States in over forty years! This means for the last four decades our politicians have merely been tinkering with the minute details of long decrepit laws and entertaining us with "heated debates" that are no more than corporate sponsored puppet shows of the grandest scope.

This is unacceptable. One way or another the current system has to end and democracy must be allowed to prevail.