Millions of people will lose unemployment benefits in the coming months unless Congress takes action. Now’s the time to extend the social safety net programs in the stimulus package.

Here in Wisconsin, the first state to enact unemployment insurance, the headlines blare that more than 100,000 Wisconsinites could lose their unemployment benefits by the end of April.

Wisconsin legislators are contacting members of its congressional delegation and sent a letter to Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, asking for a reauthorization of critical benefits in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

“Without this extension, 104,000 Wisconsinites will lose their benefits by the end of April, 2010,” reads the letter. “The job market has not rebounded.”

While state legislators write to Congress, the state’s Department of Workforce Development is sending out letters notifying people their unemployment benefits will end within several weeks.

2009 was a tough year for Wisconsin. Places like Janesville have been hard hit by the downturn in the automotive industry. The state has lost about 163,000 jobs during the past year. Wisconsin’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate is just under 9 percent, which is below the national rate but far higher than the state rate of 5.9 percent from a year ago.

But those numbers do not portray how bad it is. In 2005, The Progressive published a story called “The Stealth Depression in Black America.” Among African American men, Milwaukee’s jobless rate stood at 59 percent. And that was before the recession started.

Like other states, Wisconsin’s unemployment fund is in crisis. Wisconsin will have to deal with a projected deficit of about $2.8 billion by the end of 2011.

Wisconsin isn’t the only state facing depleted funds as this so-called jobless recovery continues. A new National Employment Law Project report finds that without congressional action, nearly 5 million jobless workers will lose benefits by June.

Congress needs to act now and extend these benefits.

The new documentary, Our Disappeared/Nuestros Desaparecidos, examines the disappearance of 30,000 people during Argentina’s military dictatorship of 1976-1983. Though Argentina’s history differs from ours, we can still take away a valuable lesson: those who participated in state-sponsored torture must be held accountable.

This moving film was written and directed by Juan Mandelbaum. Mandelbaum fled Argentina in 1977 to escape the growing repression in his country. He returns thirty years later after an accidental discovery. Through a Google search, Mandelbaum learned that Patricia Dixon, a college girlfriend, was one of the “disappeared.”

Patricia Dixon

Mandelbaum returns to Argentina to see what happened to Dixon and to others who had also disappeared. He weaves the national narrative—Peron’s return to power and the military junta’s deliberate attempt to destroy the left—with personal ones. We hear from the mothers, fathers, siblings, and even the children of the disappeared. The pain in people’s faces when talking about their missing loved ones is heartbreaking.

The director doesn’t shy away from the violence perpetrated by leftist armed radicals. “But the film leaves no doubt that there was no equivalency between the actions of the left and the repression by the military,” Mandelbaum writes in his director’s statement. “The military represented the State of Argentina, and were obligated to follow the law.”

Instead, people were kidnapped, tortured, and held in secret detention centers. Mandelbaum visits the infamous Navy Mechanics School, which housed a detention center and five torture rooms. It was here that pregnant women were kept alive until the birth of their children, who were then adopted by military and police families. It was here that Mandelbaum’s ex-girlfriend was probably taken.

In an interview on the PBS website, Mandelbaum recounts the this experience:

“Filming at the Navy Mechanics School, where up to 5,000 people were detained, tortured and later thrown alive into the river from airplanes, and where Patricia was almost surely taken, was really tough. There was a moment when I was on the central staircase. I was climbing the stairs and realized that the detainees like Patricia, shackled and blindfolded, would have held the same rail. A small thing like that hit me really hard.”

Mandelbaum incorporates homemade movies, black and white photos, and archival footage into his film. There’s damning footage of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1977 endorsing the military’s president, saying that he hoped they got their terrorist problem under control as soon as possible.

Blanket amnesty laws for those who tortured were passed in the 1980s. In 2005, the Argentine Supreme Court revoked the amnesty laws.

At a time when President Obama keeps repeating that he wants “to look forward and not backward” regarding human rights abuses committed during interrogations, Mandelbaum’s film offers a different take.

“Without opening up the past and facing the truth, there can be no healing,” says Juan Mandelbaum. “Terror will have won.”

Our Disappeared airs this week on PBS.

Reporter Helen Thomas did not get a chance to ask President Bush a question at his last press conference. But luckily Amy Goodman of Democracy Now sat down with Thomas. (Click here to read.)

As a White House correspondent for the United Press International, Thomas began covering the Kennedy White House. She was not assigned to the beat—she just started showing up.

Next week she will start covering the Obama Administration as a columnist. She recently penned a column about Bush’s Presidency entitled, “History Cannot Save Him.”

“As he leaves office, President Bush is passing on to his successor two wars and a growing economic debacle. What a way to go!” she writes. “Because of Bush’s policies, the U.S. also is complicit in the Israeli attack on the Palestinians on the Gaza Strip by providing a ‘made-in-America’ high-tech arsenal for the assault and blocking a ceasefire for nearly two weeks, a move intended to help the Israelis consolidate their hold.”

What I most appreciate about Helen Thomas is her courage and her outrage. I interviewed her in 2004 and she was kind and gracious in person, but had a thick skin when it came to criticism. She was unapologetically a liberal, before it was cool again.

Here’s an excerpt of my August 2004 interview:
Q: Even after 9/11, when the press was really tame, there were still charges by some people in the press that there was a liberal media. Do you agree?

Thomas: I’m dying to find another friend. I am a liberal. I was a liberal the day I was born, and I will be until the day I die. What’s a liberal? I care about the poor, the sick, and the maimed. I care whether we go to war for unjust causes. I care whether we shoot people who are innocent. There’s no such thing as a liberal media. I think we have a very conservative press. Read the columnists. They are predominantly conservative. I don’t relate to them at all. I’m looking for another liberal.

Q: But there was a time when there were more liberal voices.

Thomas: There were more. But the press has moved with the country to the right. There was a Ronald Reagan revolution. There were many more liberals in the Great Depression, World War II. They had heart and soul and compassion. Reporters see so much more than anyone else, really, if they open their eyes. It’s their job to take a very human approach. I don’t see how you can see what’s all around you and not be liberal. You see the poor. You see the hungry. You see the suffering.

In Democracy Now’s interview with her, Amy Goodman notes that former White House Scott McClellan spoke about Thomas’s role in the White House Press corps.

Scott McClellan: “Well, first of all, I think we need more Helen Thomases in the press corps, both the national press corps, even in the White House press corps, as well. She is someone who is not afraid to ask the tough questions and hold people accountable for the decisions that are made. So I think that’s important to state right up front.”

Goodman asked Thomas if she has her first question ready for Barack Obama.
“Sure. I have a thousand of them,” Thomas responded. “What are you going to do to fulfill your ideals expressed on the campaign trail? Or are you going to submit, like most presidents, just . . . try to carry out your promises that have no meaning except for how many people gave you money?”

Yes, we need more Helen Thomases in the press corps.