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This week on Uprising:

* Obama’s Budget Capitulation to GOP Reaches New Depths
* Exxon’s Yellowstone Disaster: Yet Another Oil Spill Hits U.S.
* Black Agenda Report on the Pelican Bay Prison Hunger Strike
* How Women in Sports Face Sexism, Homophobia

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Obama’s Budget Capitulation to GOP Reaches New Depths

Economists expressed surprise at the jobs report from June that was just released on Friday. The economy added only 18,000 jobs last month, far fewer than was expected, leading to an official 9.2% rate of unemployment nationwide. It is within this context that on-going Congressional battles over the national debt ceiling are happening. President Barack Obama invited Republicans to the White House on Thursday for a summit on the debt ceiling and spending cuts. The GOP is pushing for a 10-year budget deal in exchange for their approval on the new debt cap. Talks abruptly stalled last month when House Majority Leader Eric Cantor walked out of negotiations in obstinate disagreement over Democrat’s proposals to raise taxes as part of a compromise deal. Some Republicans have so far been cavalier about a default, but prominent voices are increasingly raising alarm about the potential consequences as the August 2nd deadline to raise Treasury’s 14.3 trillion borrowing cap looms. Standard and Poor’s recently announced it will reduce the US’s credit rating immediately if the US misses a payment on its debt, sending anxiety through financial markets. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitner insists his bureau will allow a default if no deal is brokered, but some Republicans are calling this a bluff. The President has chided both parties for failing to come to an agreement, saying during Wednesday’s Twitter town hall that each side needed to “put their dogmas” and “sacred cows aside.” Reports have circulated that Obama is prepared to sacrifice major “sacred cows” of the Democratic party to reach a resolution – namely Social Security and Medicare. The President has publicly said he is not interested in unilaterally raising the debt ceiling by interpreting the 14th amendment of the constitution as granting that power. However, the GOP is embracing a plan to use the constitution for its own means, by floating proposals for a constitutional amendment that would mandate a balanced budget by 2018, and force a super two-thirds majority vote to raise taxes at the federal level.

GUEST: Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect as well as a Demos Distinguished Senior Fellow. He was a longtime columnist for BusinessWeek, and continues to write columns in the Boston Globe. He is also the author of “A Presidency in Peril: The Inside Story of Obama’s Promise, Wall Street’s Power, and the Struggle to Control our Economic Future”

Exxon’s Yellowstone Disaster: Yet Another Oil Spill Hits U.S.

Just over a year after the most devastating oil spill in U.S. history hit the Gulf Coast, a new, albeit smaller scale spill has hit the Yellowstone River in Montana. Over the July 4th holiday weekend, an oil pipeline owned and operated by Exxon Mobil that runs under the river, ruptured, spilling tens of thousands of gallons of crude oil into the water. The spill, which happened just outside Billings, Montana, could potentially be devastating to the local wildlife and aquatic life – Yellowstone is known for its trout and bird populations. Cleanup efforts have been hampered by debris and flooding. As a result, local residents’ front yards and fields are being contaminated by oil-slicked water. Two hundred workers and 40,000 feet of protective boom are being deployed. Exxon Mobil is the world’s most profitable corporation, and the largest global oil company today. Exxon spokespersons, using BP’s 2010 playbook, have made strong assurances that all the oil would be cleaned up, and that there is minimal impact on human life and wildlife. The Silvertip pipeline that ruptured, runs from Wyoming to Montana, and was buried about a dozen feet under the Yellowstone river in 1991. It is 12 inches thick with a concrete coating, and it is not yet known exactly how the line ruptured. The accident has called into question a large and controversial project in the same area by a Canadian oil company. TransCanada hopes to construct a pipeline called the Keystone XL Pipeline under the Yellowstone River, carrying 830,000 barrels a day to Gulf Coast Refineries.

GUEST: Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, Director of NRDC’s International Program

To urge Secretary of State Hilary Clinton to stop the TransCanada Pipeline project, visit www.stoptar.org.

Read Susan Casey-Lefkowitz’s blog: http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/sclefkowitz/

Black Agenda Report on the Pelican Bay Prison Hunger Strike

Glen Ford is a writer and radio commentator and the Executive Editor of The Black Agenda Report. This week’s commentary is on the Pelican Bay Prison Hunger Strike.

Visit www.blackagendareport.com for more information.

How Women in Sports Face Sexism, Homophobia

In 1999 the U.S. women’s soccer team won the Women’s World Cup. Brandi Chastain kicked the winning goal in an overtime penalty shootout with China, and dropped to her knees and raised her fists in victory. She also tore off her jersey, exposing a modest black sports bra. Obviously overcome by the same emotion exhibited by all male athletes at the moment they are crowned the kings of their sport, Chastain’s act became a much talked about mini-scandal. Her exposed torso and sports bra became headline news in the larger media realm, overshadowing an historic win. But by the 2007 Women’s World Cup, attention on women’s soccer had waned so much, the Women’s U.S. team ran ads with pictures of the team captioned with “The Greatest Team You’ve Never Heard Of.” The 2011 Women’s World Cup is currently underway in Germany, but has earned a sliver of the international attention lavished on last year’s Men’s Cup. If the world of women’s sports was a stadium, it would be encased by a glass ceiling. The athletes are skilled and brimming with passion, but they continue to be ignored and dismissed. Female athletes are routinely sexualized to appeal to a broader – read male – audience, or derided for being too masculine. During last week’s World Cup game between Sweden and Australia, an announcer referred to a player on the latter team as “the pin-up girl of Australia.” The new “away” uniforms worn by the US women’s team have been criticized for an unnecessary design feature – a V-shaped piping coming down from the neck line to give the impression of an open blouse. My guest Jennifer Doyle writes that this design is not only ugly, it is an “anxious apology” and an affirmation that “we are not the men’s team.”

GUEST: Jennifer Doyle writes regularly about women and sports at her blog, “From A Left Wing: soccer & sports polemics.” She also teaches at the University of California, Riverside. and is the author of Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire, and is currently writing on a book about art and the athletic gesture.

Read Jennifer Doyle’s blog here: http://fromaleftwing.blogspot.com/

Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day

“Women’s chains have been forged by men, not by anatomy.” — Estelle R. Ramey