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Save Troy Davis

By Peter Rothberg

I last wrote about Troy Davis in this space in July of 2007. He was scheduled for execution for a murder he maintains he did not commit. Seven out of nine witnesses agree -- having recanted or contradicted their testimony.

Moreover, no murder weapon was found and no physical evidence links Davis to the crime. Grassroots pressure succeeded in temporarily halting the threat of Davis' execution but the threat is now back.

This new video from Amnesty International tells the story.

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May 13, 2009

Mother’s Day for Peace

By Peter Rothberg

It makes sense that the best way to honor a mother is to work to end wars that kill her sons, but the true origin of Mother's Day has been buried under an avalanche of flowers and chocolates. (Not that there's anything wrong with flowers or chocolate – but peace is more important.)

It was Julia Ward Howe, writer of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, who first planted the seed for a day for mothers to come together. It was about 12 years after she wrote that song that she instigated the first Mother's Day Peace Proclamation in 1870. A good article in the News-Messenger explains that Howe's peace proclamation was in protest of the devastation that the nation had experienced during the Civil War and gives an excellent back-story to the holiday's origin.

Gloria Steinem, Vanessa Williams, Felicity Huffman, Fatma Saleh, Alfre Woodard, Ashraf Salimian and Christine Lahti, among others, also honor Ward Howe's legacy and discuss the origin of Mother's Day in a video produced by our friends at Brave New Films.

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May 10, 2009

Free Saberi, Lee and Ling

By Peter Rothberg

You've probably heard of Roxana Saberi, an Iranian-American radio journalist and author convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison in Iran for spying. Both her family and Washington insist that the allegations are unfounded.

Saberi marked her 32nd birthday in jail last week, and yesterday her father, Reza Saberi said that she was now into her second week on a hunger strike, in which she takes only sugared water, and that despite the health threats would keep up her protest until she is released.

This BBC report details her current situation.

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May 6, 2009

Four Dead in Ohio

By Peter Rothberg

Today is the 39th anniversary of the infamous killings of four student antiwar protesters at Kent State University by members of the Ohio National Guard. Nine other students were wounded, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis.

Some of the students had been protesting on campus against the American invasion of Cambodia, which then-President Richard Nixon had recently announced in a television address on April 30. Other students who were shot had merely been walking nearby or observing the protest from a distance.

The killings helped galvanize antiwar sentiment even further especially among young people, as hundreds of universities, colleges, and high schools closed throughout the United States due to a student strike of eight million students in protest of the shootings.

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May 4, 2009

Pete Seeger at 90

By Peter Rothberg

In January, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Pete Seeger was the oldest person to perform as part of Barack Obama's inauguration festivities.

Singing the "greatest song about America ever written" (Bruce Springsteen's words) before 500,000 people live and tens of millions more on television, the then-89-year old legend crooned two little-known verses of his friend Woody Guthrie's 1940 patriotic standard, "This Land is Your Land" -- both about Depression-era poverty -- restoring the song to its former glory over the sanitized version that ruled for too many years.

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May 1, 2009

Pell Grants Get Some Stimulus

By Peter Rothberg

It's no secret that higher education is becoming too expensive for many middle-class families to bear. Today's New York Post breaks down the cost of one year at New York University. The total? A shocking $54,441!

Meanwhile, as USA Today recently reported, "Increases of at least five percent to six percent -- and in many cases higher -- are expected at public universities as university administrators struggle to maintain quality education amid state budget cuts."

Since its inception in 1965 as part of the Higher Education Act, the Pell Grant program has been the primary means to allow lower-income students to go to college. More than 5.1 million students benefited from the program during the 2006-07 school year. The problem with Pell Grants, as Pedro de la Torre details at Campus Progress, is that the program, by law, must rely on the annual budgeting and appropriations process for funding, which means that award levels often fail to keep place with inflation and/or college costs. The result has been a steep decline in the purchasing power of the grant. In 1976 the maximum Pell Grant covered 72 percent of the average cost of attendance at a public four-year college. By 2006 this figure had fallen to a paltry 33 percent. And since the recession, the value have the grants have been plummeting even further.

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April 30, 2009

Support Marcy Wheeler

By Peter Rothberg

I find myself in constant debates over whether blogging is journalism. I usually try to punt the question since I think it's the wrong frame. There are lazy reporters working for prominent newspapers doing little work of social worth and shoestring bloggers diligently holding those in power accountable. (And the reverse is true, of course, as well.)

The real question, to me, is whether a given media producer is making those in power uncomfortable. That's the true, indispensable role of the press and really the only thing that matters.

And, playing that role as if she were born to it, blogger Marcy Wheeler's Empty Wheel on FireDogLake, has, along with Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, been making as big an impact in breaking news as any blog out there.

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April 28, 2009

Ratify CIFTA

By Peter Rothberg

Co-written and researched by Corbin Hiar.

In a joint press conference with Mexico's president Philippe Calderon, President Obama recently threw his support behind the Inter-American Convention Against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives and other Related Items, a long-stalled treaty often referred to by its Spanish acronym CIFTA.

"As President Calderon and I discussed, I am urging the Senate in the United States to ratify an inter-American treaty known as CIFTA to curb small arms trafficking that is a source of so many of the weapons used in this drug war," said President Obama in Mexico City on the eve of the Summit of the Americas.

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April 27, 2009

Let's Banish Larry Summers

By Peter Rothberg

Yesterday, the Washington Post's excellent Sunday Outlook section featured a "Spring Cleaning Special" in which ten writers were given the chance to make the case for something that deserves to be thrown out this spring.

Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo argues for television's demise. Reporter Thomas Ricks calls for shutting down West Point. Blogger Ana Marie Cox insists we should put the White House press corps out to pasture, and author and Nation columnist Naomi Klein says we should banish Barack Obama's chief economic adviser Larry Summers from public life.

Klein's argument is that Summers is the embodiment of an often overlooked cause of the global financial crisis: Brain Bubbles. This is "the process wherein the intelligence of an inarguably intelligent person is inflated and valued beyond all reason, creating a dangerous accumulation of unhedged risk." Especially in the case of someone like Summers, who, as Klein rightly points out, "has been spectacularly wrong again and again."

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April 20, 2009

Legalize Industrial Hemp

By Peter Rothberg

It's hard to talk about hemp without hippie jokes but the plant is actually one of the world's most versatile crops, and has been used for centuries as a foodstuff, fabric, and fiber.

Grown in colonial New England and Virginia, hemp is today cultivated in every industrialized nation in the world other than the United States. While hemp seeds and oils can be safely consumed and hemp clothes can be bought and worn across the US, all of the hemp used to create these products must be imported from abroad.

Struggling American farmers have missed out on this growing market because, for over sixty years now, the Drug Enforcement Administration has grouped all varieties of the Cannabis sativa plant together in spite of the fact that industrial hemp contains only trace amounts of psychotropic THC--a fraction of what's present in marijuana.

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April 15, 2009