Act Now!

An Open Letter to the Orlando Sentinel

By Peter Rothberg

Dave Zirin's recent Nation article exposed the ways that the owner of the Orlando Magic, whose team is currently facing off against the Los Angeles Lakers for the NBA title, is using his team as the sporting arm of a radical right-wing empire whose reach extends from makeup to militias to reparative gay therapy. My colleague Habiba Alcindor penned the following Open Letter to the Orlando Sentinel. Please feel free to send it on to both the paper's editor and chief sportswriter.

Dear Editor,

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June 12, 2009

Press China to Help Free Ling and Lee

By Peter Rothberg

My last post detailed the plight of journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling and the international campaign to convince the government of North Korea to free them. This is a true bipartisan issue and the entire US political establishment, from the White House to stalwart Republicans like Donald Gregg, George Bush, Sr's ambassador to Korea, appears united in trying to separate the humanitarian issue of getting the women out from the broader military-political issues roiling US/North Korean relations.

The Obama administration has undertaken a full-court press in recent days, using virtually every instrument in its diplomatic toolkit to persuade the North Korean government to release the journalists. The problem is that the US has limited leverage at the moment and other strategically important members of the global community have been silent, most critically China. Beijing exerts unmatched influence over the North Korean regime as its staunchest ally, largest trading partner and most important supplier of food and energy. In the past. China has succeeded in bringing Pyongyang to the negotiating table, even when all other efforts have failed.

China's joining in the global chorus condemning North Korea's actions could be a crucial step needed to free these journalists. That's why Amnesty International has launched a new campaign to press China to take action. Lend your voice today to the call on China to intervene on behalf of Laura Ling and Euna Lee.

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June 11, 2009

Free Ling and Lee

By Peter Rothberg

Last April I wrote about the cases of two reporters for San Francisco-based Current TV, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, charged with trespassing in North Korea. They were arrested on March 17 near the North Korean border where they were reportedly covering the story of the trafficking of women. (Interesting that North Korea would not want such a story covered.) North Korean officials said on March 31 that the reporters would be indicted on charges of "illegal entry" and perpetrating "hostile acts" against the Communist state.

On June 8 Ling and Lee were convicted by the nation's top Central Court of an undefined "grave crime" against the hard-line regime. In a terse statement, the state-run Korean Central News Agency did not say where the women are to serve the time. And because the reporters were tried by the nation's highest court, there can be no appeal.

The legal process surrounding the sentencing was a flagrant violation of due process, Amnesty International has said. "No access to lawyers, no due process, no transparency: the North Korean judicial and penal systems are more instruments of suppression than of justice," said Roseann Rife, Amnesty International's Asia-Pacific deputy director.

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June 9, 2009

Time to Break Up the Banks

By Peter Rothberg

Last April, I wrote about A New Way Forward, a new and growing movement organized via the web and founded by young people who want to take back the power of the ordinary citizen to affect our economic structure. The organization's coming-out party took place last April 11 with more than sixty coordinated events coast to coast all making the case for alternative bailout plans based on the public's interest.

This new video, which neatly breaks down the causes and effects of the economic crisis, is the basis for the next day of action staged by A New Way Forward.

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June 4, 2009

George Tiller's Assassination

By Peter Rothberg

Dr. George Tiller, an outspoken advocate for abortion rights and one of the few late-term abortion providers in the country, was shot dead in church yesterday morning in Wichita, Kansas. A 51-year-old suspect was arrested three hours after the shooting in a Kansas City suburb about 170 miles from Wichita, police said.

As my colleague John Nichols notes, the National Abortion Federation identified Tiller as the eighth US abortion provider to have been murdered since 1977. According to the group, seventeen others have been targeted with attempted murder.

I last wrote about Tiller in this space in August of 2007 when he was being harassed by the state for his work and asked readers to help him keep operating his clinic in Wichita, which has been one of only three clinics in the United States that performs late-term abortions to end the pregnancies of women who doctors determine would suffer irreparable harm by giving birth.

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June 1, 2009

Stand With Sotomayor

By Peter Rothberg

Last night, Rachel Maddow had Slate columnist Dahlia Lithwick on her MSNBC show to discuss the way that conservatives are trying to paint Obama's Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor as an out-of-the-mainstream liberal whom the president selected more for her inspiring life story than her judicial chops. Debunking the spin, Lithwick argued that Sotomayor is a moderate judge, well within the judicial mainstream who is highly qualified to be nominated to the high court.

"The real problem for Sotomayor's opponents," as Lithwick wrote at Slate, "is that anyone who has closely read her opinions won't find much to build a case on. As the indefatigable team at SCOTUSblog has chronicled here and here, on the appeals court, Judge Sotomayor has taken a fairly moderate, text-based approach to the cases before her, placing her much closer to retiring Justice David Souter than to the late Justice William Brennan on the judicial activism spectrum."

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May 28, 2009

The Case for Nuclear Abolition

By Peter Rothberg

The Nation's Jonathan Schell has spent the better part of a enormously productive career making the case for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

The new president seems more open to this message than any of his Oval Office predecessors, stating clearly on the campaign trail that, "This is the moment to begin the work of seeking the peace of a world without nuclear weapons." And Obama isn't alone, nor can nuclear abolition still be painted as a partisan liberal issue when former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, among many other credentialed conservatives, have joined the cause.

Huge practical problems have to first be addressed before the threat of these weapons of mass destruction can be eliminated but there's more reason for hope than perhaps ever before. Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote about an important and inspiring new international group gaining traction, Global Zero, which launched in Europe a few months ago with a goal of taking on these problems and eliminating all nuclear weapons in 20 to 25 years.

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May 27, 2009

Supporting Sotomayor

By Peter Rothberg

The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to replace David Souter as Supreme Court Justice is a nice reminder of the type of change that the Obama administration does represent. Though not the most liberal of the prospective jurists, as John Nichols rightly noted, not only does Sotomayor's nomination make history but, if successful, it will start to establish an effective counter-balance to Chief Justice John Roberts' efforts to turn back the clock on a raft of issues especially those pertaining to race and anti-trust regulation.

Sotomayor's smarts, charisma and judicial philosophy are all on display in this short clip from May of 2003, when she served as Pace University School of Law's commencement speaker

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May 26, 2009

Out of Afghanistan

By Peter Rothberg

In my view, there are many good reasons to support the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. But Afghanistan is not Iraq and public opinion still largely supports Obama's escalation. (This is partly, I think, because there's so little media coverage of what's actually taking place in the country -- recent estimates of coverage by major news outlets report that a scant 0.6 percent of reporting has been devoted to Afghanistan.)

So, the first step to effectively opposing the war in Afghanistan is shifting US public opinion. That's why a coalition led by United for Peace and Justice has organized this Thursday's National Media Day of Action. The idea is to focus attention on all the reasons the current strategy isn't working and to highlight positive solutions for re-shifting our priorities.

Public pressure is especially critical at this moment with the White House's selection of Gen. Stanley McChrystal as top commander in Pakistan and Afghanistan after his classified role in running Special Ops in Iraq for five years. McChrystal's "rise can only mean an intensified campaign of secret--and dirty--warfare in the remote villages of Pakistan and Afghanistan," as Tom Hayden wrote recently,

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May 19, 2009

Free Aung San Suu Kyi

By Peter Rothberg

Yesterday morning, the Burmese ruling junta moved Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi from her Rangoon home, where she is serving house arrest, to Burma's notorious Insein Prison, where she will face trial on Monday, May 18th, for allegedly violating the terms of her house arrest, by hosting an unauthorized visitor after an American man swam uninvited to her compound and refused to leave.

Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for the past 19 years, following her legal election in 1990. The baseless offense she is being charged with can carry a five-year prison sentence, which would make her ineligible to run in the country's elections scheduled to take place next year.

Her five-year house arrest detention order was set to expire at the end of May 2009, after authorities imposed a one year extension in 2008. Aung San Suu Kyi's health has deteriorated in the past two years. Last week, members of her party said she suffered acute dehydration and low blood pressure.

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May 15, 2009