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This week on Uprising:

* Obama Pushes Buffett Rule to Tax Millionaires
* Student Debt Bubble Grows Ominously Large
* The Activist Beat by Rose Aguilar
* Living “Illegal”: The Human Face of Unauthorized Immigration

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Obama Pushes Buffett Rule to Tax Millionaires

As tax day comes up, ordinary Americans are struggling to meet the IRS’s deadline to fork over a chunk of their paychecks to the government and wonder whether there will be enough left over to pay for rent, food, school fees, doctor visits, and more. But most among the richest 1% of Americans are secure in the knowledge that their tax rates leave them with a greater proportion of their wealth intact than 99% of Americans.

Now, perhaps as a result of growing popular outrage expressed in the Occupy Wall Street movement, support is gathering for the so-called Buffett Rule, proposed most notably by benevolent billionaire Warren Buffett who believes that super-wealthy Americans owe the same tax rate as ordinary Americans. In fact, President Obama, in his remarks at Florida Atlantic University this week said, “If you make more than $1 million every year, you should pay at least the same percentage of your income in taxes as middle class families do. On the other hand, if you make under $250,000 a year – like 98 percent of American families do – your taxes shouldn’t go up.”

The proposed legislation, which is up for a procedural vote by the Senate next week, would establish a base-line 30% tax rate on incomes of more than $1 million a year. Income from capital gains and dividends would be considered part of taxable income at that rate.

Meanwhile, Republican Representative Paul Ryan, who is being tipped as a GOP Vice Presidential candidate, and whose recent budget proposal slashed the already tattered government safety net for poor Americans, said “I think people think the Buffett Rule is sort of budget pixie dust.” Ryan went on to assert the familiar conservative talking point that the Buffett Rule would “hurt small business owners.”

GUEST: Chuck Collins, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies where he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good; He is co-author of “The Moral Measure of the Economy” and, with Bill Gates Sr., of “Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes.” His latest book is called “99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality is is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It.” He is also co-founder of Wealth for the Common Good

Visit www.inequality.org for more information.

Student Debt Bubble Grows Ominously Large

The amount of outstanding debt among students in the United States now sits at over 1 trillion dollars, surpassing both credit cards and auto loans as the leading source of American indebtedness. The recent finding by the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau has kicked-off national concern over the possibility that there is a student debt bubble about to burst. Recent college graduates, and even those who earned a diploma long ago, are struggling in today’s weak economy to find jobs with incomes high enough to make their monthly college loan payments. A shocking number of older Americans are also saddled with higher education debt. Those who are 60 years and older owe $36 billion and face the prospect of seeing their social security garnished should they default.

The pace of student borrowing shows no sign of slowing with $117 billion in federal student loans taken out last year alone. Meanwhile more and more borrowers are defaulting on their college debts, with over $60 billion in defaults on the books. The Department of Education, in response to increasing defaults, last year paid out $1 billion in commission fees to collection agencies, some of which are being accused of violating fair debt-collection laws.

President Obama has made moves to reduce the debt-burden on graduates, capping monthly payments at 10% of the borrower’s income and mandating that outstanding debt be forgiven after 20 years. These reforms, however, do not apply to private loan providers, such as Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest, which last year issued $2.7 billion dollars in financial aid.

GUEST: Victor Sanchez, President of the United States Student Association

Find out more at www.usstudents.org for more information.

The Activist Beat by Rose Aguilar

The Activist Beat with Rose Aguilar, host of Your Call on KALW in San Francisco is a weekly roundup of progressive activism that the mainstream media ignores, undercovers, or misrepresents.

Living “Illegal”: The Human Face of Unauthorized Immigration

Has cross border migration between the US and Mexico hit “net zero”? That’s the finding put forth by Douglas Massey, reported by the Christian Science Monitor. Massey, a Princeton University sociologist, found that from 2008 – 2009 about 1 million undocumented immigrants left the US. He says those who left have not been replaced since, creating a net zero migration for the first time in 50 years.

The decrease in immigration to the US by undocumented workers since 2008 has not slowed anti-immigration legislation in the same time frame, exemplified by harsh new laws established in Arizona in 2010 and in Georgia in 2011. The laws generally allow local law enforcement officers to demand proof of citizenship status from anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. Although courts have struck down some of the most controversial provisions of these laws, the threat of living under intense scrutiny drove immigrants out of Arizona and Georgia at the same time that a lack of work in other states also pushed immigrants out of the US. A complex new reality has emerged in which tough talk about stopping unauthorized migration continues while a lack of immigrant workers negatively impacts the US economy. In Georgia, immigrants fled in numbers so high last year that the University of Georgia estimates the state’s economy lost $391 million due to a lack of agricultural workers.

In addition to economics, the issue of US immigration encompasses personal need, law and order philosophy, and what it really means to be a citizen. A multi-faceted and deeply personal examination of these controversial issues are explored in a new book, Living “Illegal”: The Human Face of Unauthorized Immigration. The book’s four authors examine the reasons for immigration and its effects on both sides of the border through interviews with undocumented migrants and the native born Americans who live alongside them, as well as those who are creating an alternative vision for US immigration.

GUEST: Marie-Friedman Marquardt, a scholar-in-residence at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, GA.

Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day:

“Law in origin was merely a codification of the power of dominant groups, and did not aim at anything that to a modern man would appear to be justice.” — Bertrand Russell