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This week on Uprising:

* Government Shutdown Imminent, New Budget Battle Looms
* Vermont Considers Single Payer Healthcare Bill
* Malalai Joya Wins Visa Battle, Makes the Case for Ending U.S. War

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Government Shutdown Imminent, New Budget Battle Looms

Democrats and Republicans are up against the clock to agree on a budget for the upcoming fiscal year before the midnight deadline Friday night. The Republican-dominated House passed the 2011-2012 budget bill HR 1, and the Senate which has a slim Democratic majority, is now battling it out. Meanwhile, the GOPs new budget proposal for Fiscal year 2012-2013, dubbed the “Path to Prosperity,” was approved by House Budget Committee Republicans on Wednesday despite adamant opposition to it by Democrats and the White House. Chairman of the House Committee on the Budget and Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan is spearheading the no-holds-barred plan to slash social safety net programs, comparing America’s safety net to a “hammock that lulls people to lives of complacencies and dependencies.” Deep cuts and drastic reorganization are slated for the healthcare programs Medicare and Medicaid. The proposal aims to defund and repeal the Affordable Care Act. It also guts funding for federal student aid. The same budget will provide over $500 billion for national defense spending in 2012, and an additional $100 billion to supplement the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Democrats are refusing to accept the proposal and negotiations are reportedly rocky. Casting a shadow over Republicans is an immovable block of Tea Party supporters. After Speaker of the House John Boehner publicly said compromise with Democrats was better than a shutdown, some Tea Party supporters began planning for his removal. The pressure to toe an extreme party line seems to be working on Representative Paul Ryan, revealing a schism between two powerful members of Congress and within the Republican Party.

GUEST: Paul Waldman, senior correspondent for The American Prospect and author of Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success.

Vermont Considers Single Payer Healthcare Bill

At the National Governor’s Association meeting last month President Obama issued a challenge. Responding to attacks on last year’s health care reform legislation he said, “If your state can create a plan that covers as many people as affordably and comprehensively as the Affordable Care Act does — without increasing the deficit — you can implement that plan.” The President also pledged support for bi-partisan legislation that allows states to opt-out of the ACA in 2014, three years earlier than the original year of 2017. Of the two states rising to meet the opt-out challenge—Oregon and Vermont—it is Vermont that is on a fast track to implementing a viable alternative in the form of a single-payer health care system. Last week, the Vermont House passed its version of the single-payer legislation in a 92-49 vote. It is currently being debated in the state Senate. Vermont’s Democratic Governor Peter Shumlin campaigned on the issue of a single-payer system and is expected to back the current bill. The Valley Advocate reports that if approved an independent public body would design a benefit package and set the parameters for the single payer system. It will be the first system of its kind in the United States, and is estimated to save Vermont $580 million annually, $1.9 billion by 2019, and create 4,000 jobs in the process.

GUEST: James Haslam, President of the Vermont Workers Center

Find out more at www.workerscenter.org.

Malalai Joya Wins Visa Battle, Makes the Case for Ending U.S. War

When a trove of more than 100 photos of mutilated Afghan corpses and U.S. soldiers posing next to them, recently surfaced, it was expected to be a scandal on the scale of Abu Ghraib. But since the publication of the photos by Rolling Stone magazine, there has been little of the type of national disgust that the Iraq prison photos elicited. The photos were taken last year by members of the 5th Stryker Brigade and had smiling soldiers posing next to horrifically maimed Afghan bodies. Passed around as war trophies, Rolling Stone says “the Pentagon went to extraordinary measures to suppress the photos, launching a massive effort to find every file and pull the pictures out of circulation.” Malalai Joya, former member of the Afghan parliament, targeted for speaking out against U.S.-backed warlords, wrote in the Guardian about the so-called “kill teams” that took the photos. She said, “While these photos are new, the murder of innocents is not. Such crimes have sparked many protests in Afghanistan and have sharply raised anti-American sentiment among ordinary Afghans.” Malalai Joya is a hero in Afghanistan to to the vast majority of the population. But for her outspokenness she has survived numerous assassination attempts by the warlords she criticizes. She is also a staunch critic of the U.S.-NATO war, and was recently denied a visa into the U.S for an extensive speaking tour. After an extensive national campaign that involved letters by multiple members of Congress, petitions, and a national call-in day to the U.S. State Department, Malalai Joya was finally allowed to the enter the country. She has traveled across the U.S. to promote the paper-back edition of her book, A Woman Among Warlords. I’m very pleased to welcome her in person to Uprising.

NOTE: In the interest of full disclosure, I have worked intimately with Ms. Joya for years and my organization Afghan Women’s Mission, which I run in a volunteer capacity, is one of the main sponsors of her tour.

GUEST: Malalai Joya, author of A Woman Among Warlords, former member of the Afghan parliament.

Find out more at: www.malalaijoya.com/dcmj/
and www.afghanwomensmission.org

Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day

“I don’t fear death; I fear remaining silent in the face of injustice, I fear becoming indifferent to the fate of my people.” – Malalai Joya