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This week on Uprising:

* Activists Occupy the Courts, as South Carolina’s GOP Primary Field is Narrowed
* GOP’s 2012 Election Season Rife With Racism
* Obama Rejects Keystone Pipeline Deal in Victory for Environmentalists
* Tucson Unified Bans Books to Comply with Arizona’s Ethnic Studies Ban

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Activists Occupy the Courts, as South Carolina’s GOP Primary Field is Narrowed

While GOP candidates spent Friday stumping for votes in Saturday’s South Carolina presidential primary, activists gathered on courthouse steps nationwide to protest the 2010 Supreme Court ruling known best as Citizen’s United. Friday was the 2nd anniversary of the controversial 5-4 decision in Citizen’s United v. the Federal Election Commission that defined independent spending toward elections as a form of free speech that can not be restricted. Instantly, Political Action Committees funded by corporations and deep pocketed individuals sprang-up. The super PACs unleashed a torrent of attack ads during the 2010 mid-term elections, credited to anonymous committees that are actually backed by political heavy hitters, like Crossroads GPS that is tied to Karl Rove. This year in South Carolina alone PACs and candidates have spent a record $11.3 million on ads.

The power of PACs to dominate an election through unaccountable donors has sparked outrage, and satire. They are a target of comedian Steven Colbert, who months ago started his own PAC, Making a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and recently transferred ownership of it to friend and fellow comedian John Stewart so Colbert could launch a tongue-in-cheek presidential campaign. Last week Colbert, a South Carolina native, reportedly polled higher than the fledgling GOP candidate John Huntsman, a source of embarrassment for Huntsman who suspended his campaign shortly after. Hunstman left the race on Monday and immediately endorsed Mitt Romney calling him, “the candidate best equipped to beat Barack Obama.” Romney’s campaign was jarred on Thursday by two pieces of news that knocked him from first place. Iowa Caucus officials announced that Rick Santorum, not Romney, won the Caucus on January 3rd. Also, polls show Romney is now in a dead heat with Newt Gingrich, each supported by about 34% of Palmetto state voters. Gingrich received the endorsement of Texas Governor Rick Perry when Perry bowed out of the race on Thursday, but at the same time was hit with controversy when his second wife told ABC News that Gingrich asked her for an open marriage so he could be romantically involved with the woman who is now his third wife.

GUEST: David Cobb, one of the founders, and the National Spokesperson, for the Move To Amend Coalition. He was the Green Party Candidate for President in 2004; joining us from the steps of the US Supreme Court on Friday where he was MC’ing the Occupy the Courts action; Amanda Terkel, Senior Politics Reporter at the Huffington Post speaking to me the day before the SC primary.

Visit movetoamend.org/occupythecourts for more information and details about nationwide actions.

GOP’s 2012 Election Season Rife With Racism

Three years into the first term of America’s first black President, racism is not only nowhere near over, it is a major feature of this year’s election. GOP candidates for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination are becoming increasingly caustic toward one another, but most have managed to make a common enemy of people of color. This year, so far at least, America’s greatest ills are not being blamed so much on immigrants or Muslims as on an imagined population of poor black Americans living comfortably on taxpayer dollars. At a town hall event days before the New Hampshire primary, Newt Gingrich told a group, “I’ll go to [the NAACP] convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” During campaigning for the Iowa Caucus Rick Santorum infamously told a group of journalists and voters, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” Shani O Hilton at Colorlines.com earlier this month highlighted findings from Capitol Words on the most uttered racial euphemisms in Washington. Far more Democrats than Republicans use the coded term “urban” to describe city areas with a significant population of people of color. Republicans, for their part, favor the term “racial preference” as a stand-in for affirmative action when opposing laws and policies that promote equality. The word Hilton dubbed the “dirtiest of words” in Washington, however, is the word “racism” itself, said by members of congress only 46 times last year. Meanwhile, the issue has become a hot topic of debate within left-leaning and progressive circles. The welcome mat some prominent progressives have put out for Ron Paul is forcing a debate on what racist expression looks like, and where fighting racial inequality sits on the totem pole of progressive politics.

GUEST: Rinku Sen, President and Executive Director of the Applied Research Center (ARC) and the publisher of Colorlines.com.

Obama Rejects Keystone Pipeline Deal in Victory for Environmentalists

President Barack Obama announced on Wednesday that his administration is rejecting the Keystone XL Tarsands pipeline planned from Alberta, Canada, to the US Gulf Coast. Activists are declaring a cautious victory over the rejection of the 1,700 mile pipeline project which attracted some of the largest protests in the history of environmental movement last year. Mass public opposition to the pipeline is based on the fact that it would have cut across the United States, particularly under the nation’s largest aquifer, with the likelihood of numerous and disastrous future leaks all but guaranteed. The tarsands pipeline was also projected to significantly accelerate the emission of greenhouse gas-driven climate change. The Obama administration’s rejection is based on the fact that no alternate pipeline route was proposed, and that the environmental impact was not properly assessed in justifying the State Department’s rejection of the final permit. The President said in a statement, “[t]he rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by Congressional Republicans prevented a full assessment of the pipeline’s impact, especially the health and safety of the American people, as well as our environment.” However, the State Department also issued a statement leaving open the door for future motion on the pipeline, saying: “the …denial of the permit application does not preclude any subsequent permit application or applications for similar projects.” Meanwhile, Lt. Dan Choi, one of many people arrested in protest of the tarsands pipeline last August, will go to trial on Monday January 24th. He is one of only three people of all those arrested, who is facing trial. Choi is perhaps best known for his public opposition to the now defunct Don’t Ask Don’t Tell military policy and has been outspoken on a number of progressive issues.

GUESTS: Kim Huynh, Federal Dirty Fuels Campaigner with Friends of the Earth, Lt. Dan Choi, Iraq war veteran, discharged from the Army under the now defunct Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, one of several people arrested last August during protests against the Keystone XL pipeline in DC.

Visit www.foe.org and www.350.org for more information. Follow Dan Choi @ twitter.com/ltdanchoi.

Tucson Unified Bans Books to Comply with Arizona’s Ethnic Studies Ban

Writings by Buffy St. Marie, Rigoberta Menchu and even William Shakespeare were banned from Tucson, Arizona classrooms last week. The Tucson Unified School District board voted 4 to 1 last Tuesday to allow at least 50 works, including some art pieces, to be swept from schools in order to comply with a 2010 state law that prohibits ethnic studies courses. Tucson Unified was targeted by Arizona state superintendent of public instruction John Huppenthal last June. Huppenthal said if the district did not remove material in violation of the law, it would lose 10% of its monthly budget. Many of the works now piled in storage are by writers of Mexican and Native American descent. Winona LaDuke’s “To the Women of the World: Our Future, Our Responsibility,” was confiscated from classrooms, as well as Sherman Alexi’s “Ten Little Indians.” Long respected text books now banned include the two-decades old, “Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 years,” and Paolo Freire’s celebrated work, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” One Arizona teacher told the Wall Street Journal that Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” was banned because, “[t]he likelihood of avoiding discussions of colonization, enslavement, and racism were remote.”

GUEST: Roberto Rodriguez, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, and a member of the Mexican American Studies -Tucson Unified School District community advisory board, and author of two books now banned from Tucson classrooms, “Justice: A Question of Race” and “The X in La Raza”

Read Rodriguez’s recent article on the ban titled, “Arizona School Officials Caught on Tape “Urinating” on Mexican Students” can be read at his blog, http://drcintli.blogspot.com

Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day:

“Their evil is mighty/ but it can’t stand up to our stories./ So they try to destroy the stories/ let the stories be confused or forgotten.” — Passage from Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, one of the books banned in Tucson schools.