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This week on Uprising —

* US/NATO Operation in Afghanistan Reminiscent of Soviet Occupation
* Suspicious Shrimp – a new report by Food and Water Watch
* Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy
* This week’s commentaries, Empire Notes and Black Agenda Report

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US/NATO Operation in Afghanistan Reminiscent of Soviet Occupation

GUEST: Nikolai Lanine, former Soviet soldier who served in Afghanistan

2006 has been the worst year of violence in Afghanistan with more than 3900 people killed. This represents a four-fold increase over the 1000 deaths last year. the 2006 fatalities include about 1000 civilians and 180 NATO soldiers. There were more than 115 suicide attacks which killed 270 civilians and 17 foreign occupation troops. Before 2006, suicide attacks were a rare phenomenon in Afghanistan. Scores of school teachers were killed and 110 schools burned down by so-called insurgents, identified as Taliban. What once was a “success story” for the Bush administration’s “war on terror” is now deteriorating by the day. Meanwhile, an ex-Soviet soldier, now living in Canada, warns that the US-NATO mission in Afghanistan is reminiscent of the ten-year long bloody USSR occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. That occupation killed more than a million Afghans and more than 10,000 Soviet soldiers. According to Nikolai Lanine, “Like the Soviet-Afghan war, this one is fought in the name of state security, a peaceful Afghanistan, and women’s rights.”

Read Nikolai Lanine’s article here:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/
RTGAM.20061130.wcoafghan30/BNStory/specialComment/home

Empire Notes on Keith Ellison

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 Keith Ellison.

Empire Notes is online at www.empirenotes.org.

Suspicious Shrimp

GUEST: Adrianna Natsoulas, Marine Campaign Coordinator with Food and Water Watch

Shrimp is the number one choice of seafood in the US. Americans eat on average, three and a half pounds of shrimp a year, surpassing even tuna. Contrary to what we might think, most shrimp is not caught in the Gulf of Mexico, rather they are farmed in man-made ponds, off the coast of Thailand, Vietnam, Ecuador, and other tropical countries. A new report by Food and Water Watch focuses on the health risks of such industrialized shrimp production and consumption. The report is called Suspicious Shrimp, and it concludes that eating imported shrimp may cause neurological damage from ingesting pesticides, an allergic response to penicillin residues or an infection by an antibiotic-resistant pathogen. This comes as a result of contamination from the untreated sewage that pollutes the water used by shrimp facilities, and from more than a dozen types of pesticides and antibiotics applied to the ponds to control disease and parasites. According to Executive Director Wenonah Hauter, “Popcorn shrimp at an all-you-can-eat buffet may seem like a bargain, but industrially produced shrimp comes with costs to our health, our environment and our communities.”

For more information, visit www.shrimpactivist.org and www.foodandwaterwatch.org.

Download the entire report, Suspicious Shrimp here: http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/fish/pubs/suspicious-shrimp/download?id=pdf

Black Agenda Report on Somalia

GUEST: Glen Ford is a writer and radio commentator and the Executive Editor of The Black Agenda Report

This week’s commentary is called “Somalia Victimized by U.S., Ethiopia and Their Warlord Allies.” Visit www.blackagendareport.com for more information.

Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics

GUEST: Stephen Duncombe teaches history and politics of media and culture at the Gallatin School of New York University and author of “Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy”

A new book by Stephen Duncombe claims to be a 21st Century Manifesto for the left. “Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy” makes the case for a progressive political strategy that embraces a new set of tools. What practical political lessons can we learn from corporate theme parks, ad campaigns, video games like Grand Theft Auto, celebrity culture, and Las Vegas? According to my guest, Stephen Duncombe, liberals continue to depend upon sober reason to guide them and he proposes that the afore-mentioned examples of popular fantasy can help us define and make possible a new political future. According to Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire and Multitude, “Imagination is central to all successful political projects and yet the mainstream Left has allowed its imaginative faculty to atrophy in recent years. Duncombe shows how the method of the some of today’s most creative social movements can teach the Left how to dream again and, by exercising its imagination, to create a winning progressive politics.”

For more information, visit dreampolitik.com

Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” — Albert Einstein