Grading the First 100 Days

The start of Obama’s first 100 days in office are marked with bailouts, international meetings on climate, contaminated foods outbreaks, scandals, foreclosures, and increases in homelessness and unemployment, providing President Obama ample opportunities to fulfill the changes he promised throughout the campaign.

But are the first 100 days offering change we can believe in?

Building on our Mandate for Change book, on April 27, we will release a hundred day report that evaluates Obama’s progress on many domestic and international issues. The report will also include a scorecard on President Obama’s actions regarding his appointees, recent legislation, executive orders, and spending, as well as his communication with the American people.

As IPS is a “think tank for the rest of us,” we’re seeking your input on how you would grade the performance of Obama administration so far. We’ll use your views as we grade the administration and will highlight the top comments and grades submitted by readers in the report. Comments and grades can be posted below.

Chime in and add your voice to this important evaluation of the administration – and the direction our country is headed.

Mandate for Change: An Assessment of the Obama Administration’s First 100 Days

On Thursday April 23, 2009 from 7:00pm – 9:00pm,

Join the Jamaica Plain Forum and the Institute for Policy Studies for a discussion featuring prominent experts and scholars in the progressive community to assess the beginnings of the Obama administration and the chances for long term reform.

About Our Speakers:
Chester Hartman, an Associate Fellow at IPS, is Director of Research for the Poverty & Race Research Action Council in Washington, DC and founder/former Chair of The Planners Network, a national organization of progressive urban and rural planners and community organizers.

Chuck Collins is Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good and the Working Group on Extreme Inequality. He is a contributor to Ten Excellent Reasons Not to Hate Taxes (New Press, 2008).

Janet Redman is the Co-Director of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network at the Institute for Policy Studies where she provides analysis of the international financial institutions’ energy investment and carbon finance activities. Her recent studies on the World Bank’s climate activities include World Bank: Climate Profiteer, and Dirty is the New Clean: A critique of the World Bank’s strategic framework for development and climate change. She has appeared on several radio programs and C-SPAN sharing positive visions for fair and equitable climate action in the United States and overseas. As a founding participant in the global Climate Justice Now! network, Janet is committed to bringing hard-hitting policy analysis into grassroots and grasstops organizing.

Click here for details and directions to this event, which will be held at:

First Congregational Church in Jamaica Plain Unitarian Universalist
3 Eliot Street
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130

North Korea sends message, ‘Don’t ignore us!’

Mandate author, John Feffer discusses the challenges the Obama administration will face when dealing with North Korea in an article for McClatchy online.

Just as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was arriving in Asia this week, Pyongyang was threatening to test a long-range missile. That’s its way of saying, “Don’t ignore us!” North Korea’s nuclear program is not in the top tier of foreign policy issues facing the Obama administration. The new team in Washington believes it has to deal with other priorities – the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the global economic meltdown, climate change and Middle East peace – before it can address the North Korean conundrum.

But North Korea isn’t waiting patiently for its turn in line. Its economy is in lousy shape. It has difficulty feeding its population. Its leader Kim Jong Il is reportedly recovering from a stroke, and no one knows who will be the next head of state. Firing a long-range missile is one way that North Korea can prove that it’s still alive and wants a deal now.

Read the entire article here.

GWOT’s End?

Mandate author, John Feffer evaluates the Obama administration’s recent efforts to reform the ‘global war on terror’ in weekly ezine World Beat.

Last week, shortly after being inaugurated, President Barack Obama ended the “global war on terror” (GWOT). Or so The Washington Post reported. The new president countermanded the Bush administration’s extralegal approaches by mandating the closure of Guantánamo within a year, outlawing the use of torture in interrogations, and putting the CIA out of the secret prisons business. Obama announced that he wanted to “send an unmistakable signal that our actions in defense of liberty will be as just as our cause.”

Sounds good. But the Post’s declaration might be just as premature as President George W. Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech on the USS Lincoln that signaled the “end” of the Iraq War.

To read the full article click here.

U.S. needs an immigrant, rather than immigration, policy

Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle today, Mandate author, Tomás Jimenez argues that:

Our nation of immigrants must have a bolder immigrant policy; one that promotes integration not by passively encouraging it, but by providing the tools that foster integration that is good for both immigrants and their new home.

A key part of his suggestions focus on reforming the Office of Citizenship which was formed under the Bush administration. Worth reforming or trashing? Weigh in with comments below!

Launch a Human Rights Restoration Initiative

The United States needs to restore its leadership role in promoting and protecting human rights both nationally and internationally. Over the past few years the protection of human rights has degraded, and despite the fact that many human rights treaties have recently been signed, many have yet to be fully implemented. In order to make the US a world leader in human rights once again, it should:

• Fully implement and ratify all human rights treaties.
• Develop an economic and social rights agenda to protect housing, health, and education.
• Promote comprehensive Human Rights Education.
• Take into account whether nominations to the judiciary consistently support international human rights law.

Author: Catherine Albisa, National Economic and Social Rights Initiative