Obama’s Economic Recovery Overlooks Racial Inequity

Rinku Sen, president and executive director of the Applied Research Center, publisher of ColorLines magazine, and contributing author to Mandate for Change, discusses the economic crisis and racial inequality.

As one of the last strongholds of union jobs shrinks, we have to confront a brutal truth about work in the U.S. Across the economy, workers of color are overrepresented in occupations with high unemployment rates: the service sector, construction and transportation. That’s a great deal of the reason why Black workers have been hit especially hard by layoffs and closures. Losing auto industry jobs strikes a massive blow to the ability of workers, especially Black workers, to earn middle-class incomes, to save enough to pass on to their children and to achieve some financial stability.

Click here to read the article.

Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing

Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice and contributing author to Mandate for Change, discusses Judge Sotomayor’s ongoing confirmation hearing on CSPAN.

Click here to view the video.

Does Durban II Matter?

Mandate author, Gerald LeMelle is featured on GRITtv with Laura Flanders in an interview about the Obama administration and the upcoming United Nations Conference Against Racism.

Recently, the Obama Administration announced that it would not participate in the April 2009 United Nations Conference Against Racism – a follow up meeting to the 2001 Conference in Durban, South Africa…Gerald LeMelle, Executive Director of Africa Action, discusses what really happened at the first conference and why the Obama administration’s refusal to attend this time around is troublesome.

Watch the streaming video of the interview here.

The War on Drugs

Contributing author to Mandate for Change and drug-policy expert, Sanho Tree, recently spoke at Howard University in Washington, D.C. about the so-called ‘War on Drugs’. Watch a streaming video of the talk by clicking the link below.

The War on Drugs

Hearing Holds Clues to Clinton’s Foreign Policy Approach

Mandate author, Phyllis Bennis appeared on the NewsHour talking about Clinton’s confirmation hearing.

It’s rather disturbing that, for example, when — when the incoming secretary spoke about Afghanistan, she talked about her own view of — in support of what appears to be president-elect Obama’s plan to double the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and then engage in a serious strategic discussion to figure out what to do.

To me, that sounds backwards. It seems to me that you figure out your strategy first, before you send additional troops. So, I think that this notion of soft power is very important, but I heard too many parts of her testimony today where she sort of said the opposite when it came to the specifics.

Watch the video here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/video/module.html?mod=0&pkg=13012009&seg=2