Media outrage over abortion provider George Tiller’s murder in Wichita, Kansas has led to charges that the crime should be considered domestic terrorism, and that Scott Roeder should be punished accordingly. Arguments have ranged from Cenk Uygur’s sarcastic call in The Huffington Post for Roeder to be waterboarded to Joe Conason’s serious consideration for Truthdig of the government’s responsibility to guard us from extremists. Conason writes:

Although an overwhelming majority of abortion opponents bear no responsibility for the doctor’s murder and should feel free to exercise their constitutional freedoms to the fullest extent, there is a violent fringe on the far right that has earned the designation of terrorist. And the federal government is responsible for ensuring our safety from those menacing forces.

But, will the feds go so far as to call Tiller’s murder terrorism? Lindsay Beyerstein at Huff-Po thinks not. Beyerstein reports that although the Justice Department will investigate whether Roeder violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, to classify the crime as terrorism would exceed the feds’ capabilities.

“That designation would unleash vast federal powers to investigate large swathes of the radical anti-choice movement,” Beyerstein writes. “The feds are simply not prepared for the political fallout that would ensue if, say, Operation Rescue were officially designated as a terrorist organization.”

Regardless of the legal outcome, Tracy Clark-Flory over at Salon.com claims that the recent decision to close Tiller’s clinic proves that, in this country at least, terrorism works.

Sources: Washington Post, Salon.com, The Huffington Post, Truthdig

Image by pdeonarain, licensed under Creative Commons

On March 17, American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling were arrested for allegedly crossing the border from China into North Korea while reporting for Al Gore’s user-generated news organization Current TV. In doing so, they became unwitting players in Kim Jong-Il’s ongoing political theatrics, aimed at the U.S. in particular. This drama came to a head today when they were sentenced to 12 years hard labor by North Korea’s highest court for committing “grave crimes” against the country.

For the past month and a half, Gore and Current TV have been mum on the situation, causing SF Gate blogger Phil Bronstein to question what’s going on with our former Vice President:

“Where is Mr. Gore, Nobel winner and formerly the second most powerful person in the world in all this? How about anything from SF-based Current TV, say maybe even just a public expression of concern? At the moment I wrote this, the big story on their web site is, ‘Top 10 Sexting Acronyms For Adults.’” (as of this writing, one of the top stories is “James Cameron Joins Heavy Metal” but alas, no mention of Lee and Ling)

One hopes that Gore’s silence has been out of concern for his reporters’ safety, given the situation’s potential volatility. Indeed, Fox News reports that the State Department “did not rule out” the possibility of Gore’s involvement in negotiations but refused to comment further.

Most journalists and North Korea watchers believe that Lee and Ling will eventually be released. Jason Zengerle over at The New Republic echoes the prevailing sentiment that Pyongyang will use the journalists as a bargaining chip for bilateral talks with the U.S.: “American diplomats will jump through whatever hoops the North Koreans set up for them; and that will be that.” And, Yonhap News predicts that Pyongyang will try to get the U.S. and UN to soften any political and financial sanctions in response to North Korea’s recent nuclear missile tests. 

Regardless of the outcome, both Bronstein and LaToya Peterson at Racialicious view this as a defining moment for Current TV’s user-generated, “democratic” mode of journalism.

Bronstein writes: “Is this what happens when information becomes more democratic? No one’s willing to step up? If you work for a viewer-supplied TV cable network, does that mean no one has your back? This does not help the argument that the value of large news organizations is dwindling to nothing in favor of small entrepreneurs. There’s no encouragement for 2.0 reporting when its practitioners can disappear into the gulag with no one to fight for them.”

Peterson writes: “As we enter a world where corporate interests often trump stories that impact every day people, Current TV’s work developing user generated content and training citizens to become journalists is rapidly emerging as a model to follow to keep citizens engaged in their communities.

But, it is like the old truism: Nothing in life comes for free. In the process of fighting for truth, we have to dig deeper and go to places we never thought we’d go, often at the risk of running afoul of authorities who would rather this information was not released.”

Sources: New York Times, SF Gate, Fox News, The New Republic, Yonhap News, Racialicious

How do you mark the 50^th anniversary of China taking over Tibet? If you were China, you’d create a national holiday, of course. On March 28 the Chinese government officially forced “Serf Liberation Day” onto the citizens of Tibet, its awkward answer to commemorations of the Dalai Lama’s exile and the Tibetan uprising of 1959.

The government stated through Xinhua that this new holiday would “offer Tibetans an occasion to remember history and remind themselves to cherish the good days they have enjoyed since the democratic reform 50 years ago,” while the website of the Tibetan government-in-exile countered that “Tibetans consider this observance offensive and provocative.”

In the May issue of In These Times, Stephen Asma takes a decidedly middle path on the situation in Tibet (article not available online), and recommends a cooling of the rhetoric on both sides. He cites problematic “doublespeak” from both China and the Tibetan exiles, influencing how the West has framed the debate:

“The Dalai Lama and his own propaganda machine have been effective in setting the parameters of discussion and reflection in the West. Most Americans know one simple story, when it comes to this vexed region: Tibet = mystical, peace-loving, good guys. China = godless, pugnacious, bad guys. The reality is more complicated.”

Asma states that the Dalai Lama’s views on Tibet’s future are more pragmatic than most reports acknowledge: “He wants an ethnically controlled, autonomous region together with the massive benefits of being part of China.”

He then takes the risky position that “If it wasn’t for China, Tibet would have no infrastructure or modern development to speak of. Roads would still be rudimentary; education would be largely theological; drinking water and medical facilities would be closer to the medieval condition they were in during the 1940s.”

Asma illuminates the fraught history between China and Tibet and then recommends that “The two sides could sit down and negotiate an honorable accord, in the spirit of the Seventeen-Point Agreement [which established Chinese sovereignty over Tibet]...The real issue worth working toward is the fair distribution of economic, educational and political opportunities for both the Tibetan people and the more recent immigrant Han population.”

Sources: In These Times, the website for the Central Tibetan Administration, Xinhua

In the wake of International Women’s Day comes a study suggesting that access to reproductive healthcare for incarcerated American women not only varies widely but also often replicates the barriers to healthcare that they face in their home communities.  Michelle Chen cites for RaceWire the current issue of Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, which surveyed correctional health providers across the country.  The study found that access to reproductive health differs from state to state and that state politics plays a major role in the variation:

“...providers from states with a Republican-dominated legislature or with a Medicaid policy that severely restricted coverage for abortion were more likely to indicate that availability of abortion services was limited than were those whose state had a predominantly Democratic legislature or a Medicaid program that covered all or most medically necessary abortions.”

Furthermore, the study points out that women in prison “disproportionately represent marginalized sectors of our society; they are predominantly women of color, poor, unemployed and undereducated and thus may not have adequate access to health care in general, and reproductive health services in particular...their involvement with the correctional health system may represent one of their few opportunities to access medical care.” 

Thus, by denying standardized, comprehensive reproductive healthcare to prisoners, a system that has already barred them from decent medical care fails them once again. 

The study invokes both the Eighth Amendment, which guarantees all prisoners the right to healthcare, and the Fourteenth, which prohibits states from depriving a person privacy without due process of the law, thus protecting a woman’s right to choose abortion even under incarceration.  It concludes that to uphold these rights the prison system must directly address its healthcare policies through further study and interventions.   

Sources: RaceWire, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 

  Image by Still Burning, licensed under Creative Commons

Amid all the talk about what the stimulus bill will do for homeowners facing foreclosure, the latest issue of Left Turn contains a timely observation: “In the 30 years since the federal government’s move to deprioritize low-incoming housing led to the modern homelessness epidemic, homelessness has become a separate issue from housing.” The insight is part of a great, manifesto-like article (not yet online) coauthored by “a bunch of folks” at Picture the Homeless, a grassroots advocacy group founded and led by homeless people in New York City.

The stigma attached to homelessness, the coauthors argue, only serves to segregate the very poor into two groups—those who have housing, and those who don’t. “Frequently, we find our demands at odds with organizations. . .  who on the surface would be our allies,” they write. “Housing groups organize tenants to fight eviction and block rent increases, but their demands for the creation of ‘affordable housing’ are targeted at income ranges well above the poverty level. . . . Long-term community residents fighting against gentrification and displacement frequently fail to feel any solidarity with homeless people who already have been displaced from those communities.”

As the feisty folks at Picture the Homeless tell it: “There is not a homeless crisis, but there is a housing crisis, with homelessness being one result.” It seems like their approach is gaining traction, too. Over at Change.org, Shannon Moriarty chronicles some of the decidedly housing-oriented ways that cities plan to spend their share of the $1.5 billion allotted to homelessness prevention.

Sources: Left Turn, Change.org

China may be surpassing the U.S. in its tolerance and acceptance of transgender people, TransGriot author Monica Roberts reports for Racialicious.  With an estimated transgender community of 400,000, the Chinese government has adopted policies that grant transgender citizens civil rights under the law, allow them to change their identification cards, and legally recognize their marriages after sex reassignment surgery.  Roberts cites popular Chinese transsexual public figures like Jin Xing and Chen Lili as helping to open up public attitudes.  Jin is a former colonel in the Chinese army who is now an internationally acclaimed ballet dancer, while Chen was the first transgender contestant to win the Miss China Universe pageant in 2004 before being banned from participating in the international competition.

Sources: Racialicious, TransGriot

  Image by ernop, licensed under Creative Commons

Last week North Korea once again took a defiant stance toward the world by declaring its right to test what is widely believed to be a long-range missile. Given the pugnacious rhetoric exchanged between the U.S. and North Korea over the years, it’s easy to overlook the non-governmental Korean organizations doing important work to heal the fractured peninsula and bring peace to the region.    

The National Human Rights Commission, for example, is an advocacy institution for human rights protection established in 2001. It has developed a clear position on addressing North Korean human rights that recognizes the fundamental rights of Korean citizens while taking into account “the uniqueness of inter-Korean relations.” 

Also, the Korean Democracy Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to enhancing Korean democracy, includes in its efforts not only future-oriented organizing but also memorializing the history of Korea’s human rights struggle. The organization’s website contains a “Modern History of Democracy and Democratization Movement in Korea,” a primer on contemporary Korean politics from an alternative, grassroots perspective.        

Both of these organizations highlight the vast cultural knowledge that is often missing from the U.S.-North Korea debate. 

In 1920 one in seven U.S. farms was operated by black farmers. By 1992 that number had dropped to a mere one in 100, a decline due partly to the USDA’s pervasive racial discrimination in providing loans and subsidies and foreclosing on farms, Jessica Hoffman reports for ColorLines.

Compounding the problem, the USDA’s system for processing civil rights complaints “continues to be deficient despite years of attention,” according to a May 2008 report by the Government Accountability Office. Recalling a farmer who lost his farm to foreclosure before his civil rights claim was reviewed, former USDA civil rights department director Lloyd Wright acknowledged, “We found that the Department of Agriculture was guilty, but we really couldn’t compensate him because his land was gone.” In his first week as Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack highlighted the department’s ongoing struggle with civil rights as a challenge he will prioritize in his new position.

Meanwhile, black farmers have been working for reform. A coalition led by the National Black Farmers Association successfully lobbied for several provisions important to black farmers in the 2008 Farm Bill, including improved outreach to black farmers and a suspension of foreclosures on farmers with pending discrimination claims against the department. Fueling many of these farmer-activists is the knowledge that, in order for the black-owned family farm to endure, they must show young people that it’s possible to make a decent living as a farmer.

Forget the culture war, Ann Friedman argues in the latest issue of the American Prospect. Gay rights are a civil-rights issue. And that means the fight can’t wait around for culture to catch up.

The proof came on November 4th. Amidst hosannas from progressives celebrating Barack Obama’s victory, four state ballot initiatives successfully blasted gay rights in California, Florida, Arizona, and Arkansas.

In the wake of those votes, Friedman launches an eloquent call to action: 

Culture changes slowly. This is something I've heard a lot in the wake of the passage of California's Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage. "History is on our side! Don't worry, the demographic trends are with us!"

I'm sorry, but that's just not good enough. These are the kind of conciliatory comments that go part and parcel with the culture-war frame. Civil-rights era activists knew history was on their side. But their goal was not to make every white American comfortable with the idea of sharing public spaces and power with people of color. It was to guarantee people of color those rights, regardless of where the culture stood. That's the thing about rights. You have to claim them.

We won't win victories on LGBT rights as long as we see the issue as part of a liberal--versus-conservative war. If we're at war, it's not with conservatives. Our enemy is not James Dobson or Sarah Palin. It is the sadly accepted notion that anti-gay measures are shoo-ins on the ballot, and that same-sex couples just have to sit tight for a decade or two and wait for public opinion to catch up.

A civil-rights frame is not only more proactive -- because it doesn't allow progressives to swaddle themselves in comforting demographic trends -- it is more persuasive. It is also less divisive. The very act of invoking the term "culture war" signals that we think something is controversial, when in fact, equal rights should be the furthest thing from it.

Today is Blog Action Day, an annual event that taps thousands of bloggers across the globe to tackle a single pressing issue. This year, the focus is on poverty. We’ll be spotlighting excellent alternative press coverage of poverty throughout the day here. Let’s get started with this rallying call to progressives from In These Times: 

One of the finest traditions of the American left has been its historic commitment to solidarity with the oppressed and poverty-stricken peoples of the world.  

In the last few years, however, the progressive movement has become far too insular. As a result, we have too often neglected our internationalist responsibilities–especially when it comes to confronting the ravages of world poverty.

Ken Brociner argues that while other concerns have understandably drawn progressives’ focus—namely, the war in Iraq and electoral politics—the movement is in danger of succumbing to a deadly domestic myopia.

According to the World Health Organization, approximately 18 million people die each year due to poverty-related causes. This staggering figure represents about one third of all deaths that occur throughout the world on an annual basis. And these are deaths that could be easily prevented through better nutrition, safe drinking water, and adequate vaccines, antibiotics and other medicines.

It’s a point that’s proved particularly salient in the last few weeks, as headlines warming of Great Depression II have Americans gnashing their teeth over their disappearing retirement funds. As folks see their budgets increasingly squeezed, it’s easy to ignore the dire needs of those abroad. This dismissal has infected the campaign trail as well, with both presidential candidates confessing that the economic crisis likely will force them to roll back their foreign aid plans.

Which is all the more reason why, as Brociner notes, progressives must not lose sight of their internationalist obligations. Because if they don’t keep global poverty on the U.S. agenda, then who will?

For more alt-press dispatches from Blog Action Day, click  here . 

Sam Slovick of Good has created a powerful video series covering life on Los Angeles' Skid Row, a 50-block area of downtown that L.A.'s police chief has called "the worst social disaster in America." Check it out here.

Microcredit may not work miracles, say two economists for Wilson Quarterly, but it does a damn good job in the face of deeply entrenched poverty. Rather than being a poverty-ending panacea, microcredit is laudable for the small advances it allows borrowers to make. Using microcredit money to pay for education and medical care for their children helps some borrowers stay afloat, which is important, even it doesn’t lead them to become wealthy entrepreneurs. “The more modest truth is that microcredit may help some people earning $2 a day, to earn something like $2.50 a day,” the authors write. “That may not sound dramatic, but when you are earning $2 a day it is a big step forward.”

 —Lisa Gulya