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This week on Uprising —

* Will Congress Pass Immigration Reform?
* Empire Notes on Hezbollah’s victory – Part 2
* Coca Cola Banned in Parts of India
* Radio BC’s Glen Ford on AIDS, US policy
* Katrina’s Legacy – a new book by Eric Mann

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Will Congress Pass Immigration Reform?

GUEST: Fernando Garcia, Director of the Border Network for Human Rights based in El Paso, Texas

When Congress returns to session just after Labor Day, it only has five weeks left before recessing for the mid-term elections in November. That gives lawmakers a short time to enact an immigration reform bill. The Republican controlled House of Representatives has been holding a controversial series of hearings on immigration across the country this month, which many have denounced as political theater, intended to make immigration an emotional election year issue. Earlier this year, the US Senate passed a reform bill that provides more visas and a path to citizenship for many but not all undocumented immigrants, but also tough and excessive enforcement measures. Last December the House passed HR 4437, the enforcement-only bill that sparked millions onto the streets of US cities.

For more information, visit www.bnhr.org.

Empire Notes on Hezbollah’s Victory – Part 2

GUEST: Rahul Mahajan, author of Full Spectrum Dominance and The New Crusade

Empire Notes are weekly commentaries filed by Rahul Mahajan, author of Full Spectrum Dominance and The New Crusade. Today’s commentary is on Hezbollah’s Victory – Part 2.

Empire Notes is online at www.empirenotes.org.

Coca Cola Banned in Parts of India

GUEST: Amit Srivastava, Coordinator of the India Resource Center, Director of Global Resistance

Persistent allegations of pesticide contamination in Coke and Pepsi products in India have led to partial bans on the products in a quarter of India’s states. A complex legal battle to overturn the bans is only just beginning. The India-based Center for Science and the Environment reported that drinks manufactured by the two companies in India contained on average more than 24 times the safe limits of pesticides. Within days several states one after the other announced partial bans on Coke and Pepsi products, preventing them from being sold in government offices, hospitals and schools. Politicians jumped on the bandwagon and the southern state of Kerala introduced a total ban on the sale and production of colas.

For more information, visit www.indiaresource.org.

Read Amit Srivastava’s report on Coca Cola here: http://www.indiaresource.org/news/2006/2009.html

Radio BC on AIDS, US policy

Glen Ford, Radio BC

Today’s commentary by Radio BC’s Glen Ford is on AIDS and US Foreign Policy.

Katrina’s Legacy

GUEST: Eric Mann, author of “Katrina’s Legacy: White Racism and Black Reconstruction in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast,” director of Labor-Community Strategy Center

This August 29th will be the first anniversary of the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina which devastated the city of New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast. In all, more than 970 people are known to have died in Louisiana and more than 200 in neighbouring Mississippi. The majority Black city of New Orleans was the worst hit, with more than 200,000 residents still scattered throughout the United States. Katrina marked a turning point in American consciousness, bringing to the surface rampant poverty and institutional racism. Eric Mann, Director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center, has just written a new book called “Katrina’s Legacy: White Racism and Black Reconstruction in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.” Glen Ford of the Black Commentator says Eric Mann’s book, “places the Gulf catastrophe in the historical context of racist capitalist rule in the US at a critical time when the ‘cracks in the ruling class levees’ are visible for all to see. Mann’s book provides political leadership, the outlines of a plan for action, and calls us to our battle stations.”

The book can be ordered via phone at 213-387-2800, or online at www.frontlinespress.com.

Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day:

“The combination of institutionalized injustices, real bad luck, and stunningly incompetent disaster relief heaped relentless hardships on a fragile disapora of households too used to how stress and hardships beget the same. Then they were called out for their names, accused in the press of shooting at their own rescuers, looting their own survival, defamed for rapes that never occurred, ignored for the rapes that did, and in a mythologizing process that is still unfolding, blamed for their own need.” — David Dante Troutt, from his essay “Many Thousands Gone Again,” published in “After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Katrina.”