Act Now!

Screw Seth Rogen

By Peter Rothberg

Is date rape funny? Seth Rogen and his crew apparently think so. Watch this video from Feministing.com for the far-from-comic story.

Even actress Anna Faris, Rogen's fictional date rape victim, was shocked with the film's treatment of this criminal act, as she told the AVclub website:

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April 10, 2009

"One Thing"

By Peter Rothberg

April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and this year, Connecticut Sexual Assault Crisis Services and the Victim/Survivor Advisory Council are making it easy to take a critical first step to end sexual violence.

The "One Thing" project is an opportunity for survivors to confront the silence that typically surrounds sexual violence and allows pernicious myths to take root. In this short video, survivors share the one thing that they would tell the world if the world were willing to listen.

Are you willing to listen?

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April 9, 2009

A New Way Forward

By Peter Rothberg

What seems most immediately alarming about the bailouts and the $787 billion stimulus, write Leo Hindery and Donald Riegle in the April 20 issue of The Nation, are the countless indications that the rescue packages still fall woefully short of what is needed to confront the emergency economic conditions we face.

With the US economy having contracted at a stunning rate of 6.3 percent in the last three months of 2008, a quarterly performance rivaled only four times since the Great Depression and getting worse in '09; a growing unemployment rate, now at 12 million people, and foreclosures up 81 percent, many economists are arguing that this current stimulus is bound to fail, inevitably pushing perhaps millions more Americans over the brink of financial collapse.

This is compounded by the central problem with Obama's bailout from the point of view of experts like former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson, Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, James Kwak, George Akerlof, and Robert Shiller -- that recovery will fail unless America breaks up the financial oligarchy. The solution is to have the government temporarily take over failing banks, break them up and sell them off in the private markets. This is not the current plan.

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April 7, 2009

Ban Cluster Bombs

By Peter Rothberg

On March 10th Congress passed an omnibus budget bill that created a permanent ban on nearly all US cluster bomb exports. The legislation states that cluster munitions can only be exported if they leave behind less than one percent of their submunitions as duds, and if the receiving country agrees that cluster munitions "will not be used where civilians are known to be present." President Obama signed the bill into law the next day.

For background, cluster bombs, a favorite munition of the Bush Administration, are especially gruesome weapons of terror, dispersing hundreds of small bomblets over a wide, indiscriminate area. Each of these sub-munitions is supposed to detonate when it hits the ground, spraying deadly shrapnel. The Friends Committee on National Legislation has done a unique and harrowing service with a new tool combining google maps with a customized overlay that allows you to find out what a cluster bombing would do to your neighborhood. How wide an area would be sprayed with deadly shrapnel? How many unexploded bomblets would litter the area, waiting for the touch of a hand or foot? Expected civilian casualties? Find out here.

This video shows what cluster bombs have done to real people.

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March 30, 2009

John Hope Franklin, RIP

By Peter Rothberg

I was a history major in college so I'm especially saddened when any great historian dies. But John Hope Franklin, who passed away this morning at the age of 94, was far more than just another great historian. The first African-American department chair at a white institution and the first African-American president of the American Historical Association, Franklin, the author of the seminal From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, which has been republished nine times, was an integral part of the team of scholars who assisted Thurgood Marshall to win Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case that outlawed the "separate but equal" doctrine in the nation's public schools.

Born in 1915 in Rentiesville, Oklahoma, Dr. Franklin's endeavors, his witness, and his powerful chronicle of black America's hard-won progress toward equal rights and status continue to guide us towards achieving a free and just society. One of the most celebrated historians in the US, he was honored with several important awards--among them the Encyclopedia Britannica Gold Medal for the Dissemination of Knowledge, the NAACP's Spingarn Medal, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Videos of Franklin talking about his life can be found at the National Visionary Leadership Project.

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March 25, 2009

Get Real on Sex Ed

By Peter Rothberg

There's an under-reported health care crisis brewing in this country: A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study reports at least one in four teenage girls -- ages 14 to 19 -- has a sexually transmitted infection; The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy reports that the US has the highest rates of teen pregnancy among comparable countries, and an estimated 750,00 teenagers will become pregnant this year, and Advocates for Youth reports that about two young people are infected with HIV every hour of every day.

In recognition of this crisis, Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) recently introduced the Responsible Education About Life Act (REAL), a bill that designates federal funds for age-appropriate and medically accurate information to help young people make informed decisions about their relationships and sexual behavior.

The REAL Act will create a grant program administered by the Department of Health and Human Services that would fund comprehensive sex education programs in schools nationwide. Currently, no federal program is dedicated to supporting comprehensive sex education, while failed abstinence-only programs have received $1.5 billion in federal funding since 1996 when President Bill Clinton began a practice that was later highly accelerated by the Bush Administration.

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March 24, 2009

Stop Mountaintop Removal

By Peter Rothberg

In the United States, 100 tons of coal are extracted every two seconds. Around 70 percent of that coal comes from strip mines, and over the last 20 years, an increasing amount comes from mountaintop-removal sites in Appalachia.

Mountaintop removal is one of the most egregious environmental and social justice disasters in America today. This extreme mining practice, taking place largely in the Appalachians, has destroyed at least 500 mountains (1.5 million acres of land) resulting in a huge amount of largely unreported ecological damage and countless ruined lives.

The EPA estimates that over 700 miles of healthy streams have been completely buried by mountaintop removal with thousands more damaged. Where a highly braided system of headwater streams once flowed, now a vast circuitry of haul roads winds through the rubble.

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March 17, 2009

Stop the AIG Plunder

By Peter Rothberg

The people in AIG's financial products division are as responsible as anyone for the severity of our economic meltdown. And yet, they're currently receiving $450 million in bonuses. This travesty has unleashed a tidal wave of public outrage and forced President Obama to vow to "pursue every legal avenue to block these bonuses."

Keeping up the pressure MoveOn.org is collecting names on a petition which the group will deliver to Congress in advance of tomorrow's House subcommittee hearing with AIG executives. Add your name today.

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March 17, 2009

The USPS Still Matters

By Peter Rothberg

You may have heard that the United States Postal Service is in dire financial straits, having lost $2.8 billion in 2008 and on track to lose twice that much this year. Things are so bad that the Postmaster General recently asked Congress for permission to curtail mail delivery six-days a week.

This matters because the USPS continues to provide a vital public service. The Post Office not only reliably delivers political periodicals like The Nation -- a class of content vital to a functioning democracy -- to anyone anywhere in the country, but the mails still serve to bind our vast populace together, with many post offices serving as de facto community centers.

In this time of fiscal crisis, there is thankfully an easy way to support the USPS in the form of House Resolution 22. This arcane but very important legislation in the House, carrying 76 co-sponsors, calls for a change in the accounting treatment of retiree health benefits for USPS workers – a change that would not affect employee benefits, or raise government costs, but would make it far easier for the USPS to balance its books, as required by law, without drastic service cuts or layoffs.

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March 11, 2009

Michael Pollan Wants Your Help

By Peter Rothberg

The great food writer Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire, the Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, has gained a passionate following by encouraging us to change the way we think about, purchase and consume food.

Now he's asking for help with his new project -- one part cultural history, one part cook-book, one part nutritional guide. His operating premise, as he writes on Well, Tara Parker Pope's health blog at the NYTimes.com, "is that culture has a lot to teach us about how to choose, prepare and eat food, and that this wisdom is worth collecting and preserving before it disappears."

So he's looking to collect the food wisdom bequeathed to us by our ancestors in an effort to create a compendium of universal rules, across cultures and also time. "'Eat your colors,' an Australian reader's grandmother used to tell her; now we hear the same advice from nutritionists, citing the value of including as many different phytochemicals in the diet as possible."

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March 10, 2009