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This week on Uprising:

* Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz Criticizes Deficit Commission Proposals
* WikiLeaks Reveals Embarrassing Details, Confirms US Imperial Arrogance
* Black Agenda Report on Racism Revealed in WikiLeaks Documents
* Lowered Expectations in Cancun Climate Talks

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Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz Criticizes Deficit Commission Proposals

The co-chairs of the President’s Deficit Commission released their much anticipated report this week. Former Senator Alan K Simpson and President Clinton’s former chief of staff Erskine Bowles laid out their plan to cut spending including from Medicare and other programs, and to reform the tax code by lowering taxes for everyone including the wealthy and corporations, in order to reduce the deficit. Even though the proposal has come out of the commission, the 18 member panel failed to endorse it with the needed super-majority. Fourteen affirmative votes were needed to move the panel’s recommendations to a vote by Congress and on Friday only 11 members had voted for it. Several changes were made to the original proposal in order to woo more votes, including $50 billion in immediate spending cuts and a scaling back to 2008 spending levels which made the plan more attractive to Republicans. For Democrats, the commission’s co-chairs backed off from some of their most severe proposals to cut Social Security and turn Medicare into a voucher program. Also taken out of the plan was a proposal to impose a 6.5% federal sales tax. However, a 15c per gallon increase in the federal gas tax is still part of the final plan. Despite the fact that the proposal was not endorsed, it seems to have influenced the dialogue on deficit reduction. Several lawmakers have proposed endorsing some aspects of the plan in future legislation.

GUEST: Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate and former Chief Economist of the World Bank and a professor at Columbia University

WikiLeaks Reveals Embarrassing Details, Confirms US Imperial Arrogance

In its third major release of classified information this year, the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks.org released over a quarter of a million classified State Department diplomatic cables, most of them from the years 2006 to 2009. A small number of news organizations including the New York Times, and the Guardian of London were given early access to analyze and publish the communiques from American diplomats stationed around the world. Among the treasure trove of material that has embarrassed the US is the revelation that American diplomats stationed overseas are now routinely expected to spy on government officials and heads-of-state of countries where they are stationed, and the United Nations. The spying includes gathering personal and banking details as well as biometric data like fingerprints and DNA. The secret memos also reveal private communications by foreign government officials about third countries. For example, the Saudi king has been revealed to be urging the US to take military action against Iran’s nuclear program. This latest release of 251,000 diplomatic cables are thought to have originated from the same source as the Iraq and Afghan war logs released earlier this year. The Obama administration’s reaction has been predictable, aggressively condemning the release of the memos while warning that innocent lives are being endangered. Australia, where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is a citizen, is collaborating with the US government in attempting to bring criminal charges against Assange under the Espionage Act. Meanwhile Assange is now wanted by the International Criminal Police Organization or Interpol for sexual assault charges in Sweden. after a series of intense cyber attacks against Wikileaks.org, the California based company EveryDNS, dropped the site’s domain, saying the attacks were endangering their other clients. Wikileaks has now effectively lost its domain name and can currently be found online at www.wikileaks.ch, a Swiss domain name.

GUEST: Phyllis Bennis, directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies and is the author of numerous books, her latest being Ending the War in Afghanistan: A Primer

Black Agenda Report on Racism Revealed in WikiLeaks Documents

Glen Ford is a writer and radio commentator and the Executive Editor of The Black Agenda Report. This week’s commentary is on American Racism Exposed by WikiLeaks.

Visit www.blackagendareport.com for more information.

Lowered Expectations in Cancun Climate Talks

The United Nations sponsored conference on climate change began in Cancún, Mexico on Monday November 29th. Nearly 200 countries are negotiating over two weeks in the first global meet-up since the Copenhagen conference in December 2009. The much anticipated Copenhagen summit had begun with high expectations, but ended with a non-binding agreement that was largely derided. There was major disagreement between first world governments and the leadership of developing economies. Developing nations argued that their wealthier counterparts were dodging tough reforms. China balked at US demands to submit to third-party inspections processes of its carbon-reduction efforts. The US, and specifically the US Senate, has been criticized in the year since Copenhagen for failing to pass comprehensive climate change legislation at home. Without domestic consensus on climate goals and action, the US has not been willing to commit to international goals. Expectations going into the Cancún talks are significantly lower than a year ago, however some are calling this a shift in favor of pragmatism, not fatalism. Eileen Claussen, President of the Pew Center on Climate Change, said Cancún will be a success if small but significant steps are taken toward the eventual goal of a binding international treaty.

GUEST: Eileen Claussen, President of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change

Find out more at www.pewclimate.org.

Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day

“Don’t blow it – good planets are hard to find.” — Time Magazine