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This week on Uprising:

* Pentagon Budget Will Not Stimulate Economy
* Black Agenda Report on the AIG Executive Bonuses
* Obama Leaves Open Room for Indefinite Detention
* Empire Notes on Jon Stewart’s Recent Interview
* Privacy Advocates Up in Arms Over Google’s New Advertising Policies

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Pentagon Budget Will Not Stimulate Economy

While the nearly $800 billion stimulus package signed by President Obama has come under intense fire from some conservatives, there has been hardly any comment on the Pentagon’s 2010 budget of $700 billion. Unemployment rates are sky high, record numbers of people are claiming jobless benefits, healthcare costs are bankrupting Americans, and millions are fore-closed out of their homes. Still, the Defense Department’s budget is in line with past fiscal year budgets under President Bush. While World War II spending is credited with lifting the US out of the Great Depression, arms expert Frida Berrigan says “military spending is no longer a stimulus driver.” In her new article in the Nation Magazine, Berrigan claims that unlike the economic revival of the 1940s, this time “we began with boom years and spent our way into the breach, in significant part by launching unnecessary, profligate wars.” She goes on to explain that the bloated Defense budget “mainly stimulates corporate shareholders, stock prices and (of course) war itself.”

GUEST: Frida Berrigan Senior Program Associate of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, former Deputy Director and Senior Research Associate at the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute at the New School in New York City, columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus and a contributing editor of In These Times magazine

Read Berrigan’s article at: http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2009/next_defense_budget_stimulus_package_11761

Black Agenda Report on the AIG Executive Bonuses

Glen Ford is a writer and radio commentator and the Executive Editor of The Black Agenda Report. This week’s commentary is on the AIG Executive Bonuses.

Visit www.blackagendareport.com for more information.

Despite Drooping “Enemy Combatant” Term, Obama Leaves Open Room for Indefinite Detention

In a sharp about-turn from the Bush Administration, the Justice Department announced last week that it would drop the designation “Enemy Combatant” – a category widely used to justify imprisoning terrorism-related suspects over the last 8 years. Former president Bush used his authority as commander-in-chief to unilaterally hold prisoners without charge, indefinitely. The controversial term “enemy combatant” was used to side-step international laws like the Geneva Convention, and sparked much debate about prisoners’ rights. Now, under President Barack Obama, the Justice Department says it will no longer rely on presidential authority to hold detainees, and is instead developing new standards for imprisonment at facilities like Guantanamo and other US-run prisons that include “substantial” evidence of ties to Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. President Obama has pledged to shut down the US prison in Guantanamo, Cuba – the 200 or so prisoners still remaining there are being held as “enemy combatants” and it is as yet unknown what their fate will be.

GUEST: Hinna Shamsi, an attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, Lisa Hajjar, chair of the Law and Society Program at the University of California-Santa Barbara

Empire Notes on Jon Stewart

Empire Notes are weekly commentaries filed by Rahul Mahajan, author of Full Spectrum Dominance and The New Crusade. Today’s commentary is on Jon Stewart.

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

Visit www.empirenotes.org for more information.

Privacy Advocates Up in Arms Over Google’s New Advertising Policies

The world’s most dominant internet search engine, Google.com, announced last week that it was going to start targeting advertising to users based on the sites they visit. This type of focused marketing is called behavioral advertising. Basically if you use Google to search for children’s clothes, future Google searches may have ads tilted towards children’s items. Google can do this by tracking your every keyword and click – a policy that has privacy advocates up in arms. The fear is that user data could be made available to outside marketing companies and even government agencies like law enforcement. One news report said that “Google privacy officials, as recently as early 2008, said they had no plans to engage in behavioral advertising,” and that “behavioral advertising doesn’t work.” Google is often touted as as example of a responsible corporation, and has been recognized as one of the best companies to work for. The company has become so ubiquitous on the internet that to Google is now an acceptable “verb.”

GUEST: Micah White, Contributing Editor to Adbusters Magazine

Read Micah White’s blog, where you can learn how to subvert Google’s Adsense program here: http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/blackspot_blog/unclick_google.html

Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day

“There is a sacred realm of privacy for every man and woman where he makes his choices and decisions – realm of his own essential rights and liberties into which the law, generally speaking, must not intrude.” — Geoffrey Fisher