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This week on Uprising:

* Beck’s Rally: Not So Honorable
* Work Less So All Can Work: A Progressive Strategy for Fixing the Economy
* The Future of Pakistan: Floods, Bombs, and Corruption

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Beck’s Rally: Not So Honorable

Fox News Shock-Jock Glenn Beck’s so-called Honor Rally last weekend in Washington DC, drew, according to Beck, between 300,000 to 650,000 people. Ultra-conservative Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann insisted more than a million people were present. But CBS News hired a firm that estimated the crowd at less than 100,000. The rally was held on the same day and location as the 1963 historic March for Jobs and Freedom where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his legendary I Have a Dream Speech attracting more than 200,000 Americans. While Beck insisted that his rally was held on that day coincidentally, he has spoken about “reclaiming the civil rights movement.” In his only post-rally interview on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, Beck apologized for calling Obama a racist who hates white people about a year ago. But he went on to criticize the President’ religious views, saying they were based on liberation theology. The “Honor Rally” was advertised as being non-political and focused on honoring US Troops. But many attendees identified as members of the Tea Party movement that has assailed President Obama as a dangerous socialist. Beck himself did not mention Obama or Speaker of the House, Pelosi, and instead used heavily religious language calling on Americans to “turn to God.” The rally is the latest expression of a right-wing hysteria that seems to be sweeping some factions of American society. At stake is the political balance in Congress with the approaching mid-term elections. Republicans are hoping to make big gains in November, buoyed by the fever pitch of today’s right wing rhetoric. But what is often unsaid is how a handful of billionaires are bankrolling the extreme right and public events like Beck’s Honor Rally.

GUEST: Chip Berlet, Senior Analyst with Political Research Associates, has been studying the extreme right for the past 25 years

Read more about Berlet’s work at www.publiceye.org.

Work Less So All Can Work: A Progressive Strategy for Fixing the Economy

Conservative commentator Ben Stein wrote last week that the unemployed are a group of unskilled “complainers and malcontents”. Around the same time former newspaper editor Ira Stoll called for cutting unemployment benefits for many so-called “undeserving” groups, including married individuals whose spouses have a job. And in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, Harvard Economist Robert Barro blamed unemployment benefits for keeping unemployment high. It seems as though a new attack on the jobless is always on the horizon, even as economic forecasts remain bleak. But this blame-the-victim mentality is uniquely American when compared to the attitudes of other developed nations. In France, Germany, and the Netherlands governments discourage lay-offs by temporarily subsidizing wages and allowing companies to cut pay. Or individuals work less hours, jobs are shared, and the government steps in with subsidies. In Germany its called “short-work”, and the French say, “[work] less so all can work”. My guest John de Graaf wrote an article for the latest issue of Progressive Magazine, detailing these more flexible approaches to economic downturns. Not surprisingly he finds that not only do businesses remain productive and competitive in the world market, but workers are happier.

GUEST: John De Graaf, Executive Director of Take Back Your Time, and co-author of, “Affluenza: the All-Consuming Epidemic”

Find out more at www.timeday.org.

The Future of Pakistan: Floods, Bombs, and Corruption

Since late June this year the South Asian nation of Pakistan has experienced the worst flooding in nearly a hundred years, displacing millions of people and destroying livelihoods. One fifth of the country has been submerged and more than 20 million of its 167 million-strong population has been affected. Nearly two thousand people have been reported dead. As the flood waters have now begun to recede, the meager media coverage of it has begun similarly receding even as the real disaster is yet to unfold in the aftermath. The World Food Programme has identified what they are calling a “triple threat” particularly to the country’s farmers who have lost everything and are now facing hunger, homelessness, and increasing desperation. Nearly 500 people blocked a major highway into the city of Karachi for three hours on Wednesday, protesting the state response to the floods. The international community has pledged a little over a billion dollars in aid, much of it yet to come in. The total damage in dollars has run into the billions, overshadowing the damage of the massive earthquake in Kashmir 5 years ago. Meanwhile the US has been carrying out military attacks either unilaterally or in conjunction with the Pakistani military over the last few years and even during the floods. And, fundamentalist extremists have also stepped up their attacks, targeting civilians and the government.

Given this nexus of various political, social, military, and natural crises over the past few years, the future of Pakistan remains frighteningly in question. Unlike Tsunami and earthquakes which happen in short instances and are sometimes difficult to predict particularly in a country like Pakistan which doesn’t have facilities or technologies to follow trajectories, the floods have been a result of consistent rains and the intentional mis-management of how the floods would be routed through areas where hundreds of thousands have suffered to save the lands, lives and strategic locations of the very few. Over 20 million people have been displaced, almost 2000 dead, the economic cost of the floods is estimated to be over $45 billion. In a country that is one of the poorest on the planet with a history of corruption and abuse of power, the long term challenge will be the recovery and resettlement of over 20 million who have been displaced.

The United States military has not ceased combat operations in Pakistan either during or after the floods. Unmanned drone attacks have continued in the border region with Afghanistan. By the end of August the drone attacks, most of them launched from a CIA air base in Nevada (check), had killed 54 people, one more than the 53 deaths recorded for all of 2009. The Pakistani military also carried out air strikes on Tuesday and Wednesday in the northwestern tribal region of Khyber. Sixty people including women and children were killed. Meanwhile the US State Department announced on Wednesday that the organization named Tehreek-e-Taliban, or the Pakistani Taliban, has been officially listed as a terrorist organization. The Christian Science Monitor reports that the new designation will allow the State and Justice Departments to bring criminal charges against financial or material supporters of the organization, to freeze its assets, and prohibit its members from entering the US. Richard Holbrook called Pakistan an “epicenter of global terrorism” recently leaving many questions as to how the US/ Pakistan relationship will evolve in the aftermath of the crisis that has destabilized the nation.

GUEST CO-HOST: Hamid Khan, Executive Director of the South Asian Network

GUEST: Rahimullah Yusufzai, Resident Editor of Pakistan’s leading English daily, The News International, based in Peshawar. He also reports for the BBC, ABC News, Gulf News, and is an analyst for the Pakistani TV Channel Geo. He has been reporting on Afghanistan and the provinces of NWFP and Baluchistan since early 1980s and has traveled widely in the region.

MILITANTS TAKE ADVANTAGE OF FLOODS

In the first major attack since the floods hit, a religious procession was bombed in Lahore on Wednesday killing 33 people and injuring 250. The attacks consisted of a small bomb followed by two suicide bombers in quick succession. This morning, news of a second bombing has emerged, this time in Quetta. Forty three people were killed and more than a 100 injured in a suicide bomb attack targeting a rally in solidarity with Palestinians. Both attacks targeted Shia gatherings. Meanwhile it is being reported that the Pakistani Taliban, which was just added to the State Department’s Terrorist Watch list, are getting busy in flood ravaged areas, offering food and aid to those willing to take up their cause. Apparently they are hoping to recruit up to 50,000 new members in the wake of the floods.

GUEST: Pervez Hoodbhoy, chair of the Department of Physics at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, frequent political commentator and peace activist

THE POLITICS OF AID

After a month of flooding that has covered an area the size of England, Pakistan has yet to meet the needs of the 18 million people that have been affected by the disaster. Despite the initial outpouring of international aid, aid efforts have reached a standstill in the past week. Over $102 million has been sent by the United States, and the World Bank has raised its contribution from $900m to $1bn. According to the United Nations, there have been 121,000 tarpaulins and 110, 500 tents distributed already, potentially housing 1.2 million people. But another 5 million remain homeless, many for well over a month already. It is unlikely that 3.6 million hectares of farmland whose crops were washed away will be replanted in time for next year’s harvest.

GUEST: Nimmi Gowrinathan, Director of South Asia Programs at Operation USA, a privately-funded disaster relief organization, currently working on her Phd at the Department of Political Science at UCLA

Find out more at www.opusa.org or text “rebuild” to 50555.

Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day

“I now understand that my welfare is only possible if I acknowledge my unity with all the people of the world without exception.” — Leo Tolstoy