Clippings for 8 March 2009 - International Women's Day

International Women's Day
For a history of International Women's Day please visit the official IWD wedsite at: http://www.internationalwomensday.com/about.asp

Life and Work: A Conversation for International Women’s Day
Gloria Feldt, Deborah Siegel, Elizabeth G. Hines, and Courtney E. Martin write for the Women's Media Center: "Isn’t that one of the identifying questions people ask new acquaintances? The four of us—feminists spanning five decades—might answer by describing the physical housing we find for ourselves in each of our generational lifecycles. But in a larger sense, a generation views the world from where it 'lives' and interacts uniquely with such circumstances as the current economic recession. "

Can We Talk? Teens Need a Realistic Dialogue About Sex and Contraceptives
Shannon Reed writes for the Women's Media Center: "'Life happens. Life happens and you deal with it.' It’s the kind of cliché we expect from someone when life inconveniences us in a minor way with a spilled coffee or a new cavity. Annoying, but relatively easy to deal. But it was a very major thing that Sarah Palin was talking about when she made the remark. The former Republican vice-presidential candidate was responding to Fox News journalist Greta Van Susteren when asked about how she took the news of her daughter Bristol’s pregnancy last year. In an interview with Van Susteren that aired last week, 18-year-old Bristol discussed life with her newborn son, Tripp, and Governor Palin popped in at the end to say a few words. Coverage of the interview focused on what Bristol had to say about teen abstinence—and more about that in a minute—but it’s the casualness of Sarah Palin’s remark that stuck a chord with me."

Nepalese Women Free From War but Not Violence
Rosalie Hughes, Reuters AlertNet: "As Ashmi's belly grew, so did the insults. Eventually they turned violent. A female neighbour spat on her. Two boys she'd grown up with pelted her with rocks on her way home from school one day. She no longer felt safe in her village. Her growing belly reminded her that two lives were in danger. When she was three months pregnant, Ashmi followed the advice of a community-based organisation and left her village for a women's shelter in the capital Kathmandu. Ashmi's story embodies the hundreds of stories represented in a recently released report by the International Rescue Committee, United Nations Populations Fund (UNFPA) and Saathi, a Nepali NGO. The report looks at gender-based violence in two districts of mid-west Nepal, through interviews with over 400 women and focus group discussions with men, women and children."

Recommended Video: Celebrating Women of their International Day
Juliana Rincón Parra writes for Global Voices: "International Women's Day has been celebrated since the early 1900s: at first as a reminder of all the wrongs done to womankind and the long hard row necessary to achieve equality and fight for women's rights. However, for the past few years, many of the original points of dissention have been resolved and right now the day is used to celebrate the positive improvements instead of a reminder of the bad events. And through poetry marches and songs, we'll see how people around the world do just that."

Q&A: "Time Has Come for a New UN Women's Agency"
Nergui Manalsuren reports for Inter Press Service: "After being blind for years to the needs and rights of women, the United Nations is finally well on its way to creating a 'fully resourced' women's agency, says Stephen Lewis, the former UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa."

Glenn Greenwald And Amy Goodman Share Inaugural Izzy Award For Independent Media
The Park Center for Independent Media (PCIM) at Ithaca College has announced that its first annual Izzy Award for special achievement in independent media will be shared this year by two pillars of independent journalism: blogger Glenn Greenwald and “Democracy Now!” host/executive producer Amy Goodman.

CIA Videotapes Depict "Enhanced Interrogation Methods"
Daphne Eviatar reports for The Washington Independent: "The CIA has reportedly just confirmed - conveniently late on a Friday afternoon - that 12 of the videotapes it destroyed while its interrogation methods were under investigation and the subject of a pending lawsuit depicted the 'enhanced interrogation methods' that detainees' advocates were worried about."

A Bank Bailout that Works
Joseph Stiglitz writes for The Nation: "The news that even Alan Greenspan and Senator Chris Dodd suggest that bank nationalization may be necessary shows how desperate the situation has become. It has been obvious for some time that a government takeover of our banking system--perhaps along the lines of what Norway and Sweden did in the '90s--is the only solution. It should be done, and done quickly, before even more bailout money is wasted. "

Follow the Stimulus Money
ProPublic is doing a series of articles to help people follow what happens with the stimulus money the Federal Government is pouring into the economy. Michael Garbell writes: "Piggybacking off my colleague Christopher Weaver’s post on state Web sites tracking the stimulus [1], here are the projects lists released by states and federal agencies. From highways to health centers and education to explosives detection, the data provides the clearest picture yet of how officials are spending the stimulus. Oddly enough, some of the lists aren’t on the state sites, or even Recovery.gov [2]."

Keeping People in their Homes
Our friends at KansasJackass write: "If you listen to Republicans, the only entities in this country that ever deserve a leg-up from the federal government are businesses. Be it bailouts or tax cuts, the only people Republicans ever uniformly want to help is corporations and big business."

Foreclosures Now Affecting 1 in 8 American Homeowners
J.W. Elphinstone reports for The Associated Press: "Foreclosures are spreading by epidemic proportions, expanding beyond a handful of problem states and now affecting almost 1 in every 8 American homeowners. It's an economic role-reversal: The economy, driven down by the collapse of the housing bubble, is causing the housing crisis to spread."\

Ten Things You Can Do to Stay in Your Home
The Nation and ACORN team up to provide homeowners the following advice: "Without resolving the chicken-egg question of which came first, the housing crisis or the banking crisis, we can say that the pace of foreclosures is accelerating with the downward economic slide. Every thirteen seconds, an American loses his/her home. In 2008, more than 2.3 million families faced foreclosure. If the government doesn't intervene in a muscular way, an estimated 6 million owners will lose their homes in the next three years. President Obama has proposed to attack the crisis with a $75 billion initiative, the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan. A commendable effort to directly address the problems faced by homeowners, the bill nevertheless has inherent limitations on who can benefit from it. "

The "American Consumer" Is Responsible for Narcotrafficking
In a wide-ranging interview with two journalists from Le Monde, Mexico's President Felipe Calderon avers that the first cause of drug trafficking (English translation by Truthout.org): "... is the American consumer. If the United States were not the biggest drug market in the world, we wouldn't have this problem. And there's also the arms trade. In two years, we've seized 33,000 weapons, 18,000 of them high caliber, rocket launchers, thousands of grenades, devices able to pierce armor plating. Now, the overwhelming majority of this materiel had been purchased in the United States, including materiel which is the exclusive property of the American Army. In 2004, (the Bush administration) lifted the prohibition that had previously been in place against the sale of these very dangerous weapons." For original French article click here.

Tradegy Strikes at Home: Soldier Suicides
Phil Aliff writes for CounterPunch: "In the early morning hours of October 20, 2008, Pfc. Timothy Alderman took his own life in his barracks at Fort Carson, Colo. He died of an apparent prescription drug overdose. The 21-year-old had been stationed in the Iraqi city of Ramadi. Before his long deployment to the Middle East, he had never suffered from any mental health problems. In fact, according to his medical records, he didn't think he would have difficulty returning home because he 'mostly had fun killing people and getting paid for it.'"

Tens of Thousands Have TBI, Officials Say
Kelly Kennedy reports for Army Times: "As Army officials announced the beginning of Brain Injury Awareness Month, they offered up a figure that makes it hard to believe anyone in the military could be unaware of the problem: Between 45,000 and 90,000 troops have been treated for traumatic brain injury symptoms ranging from headaches to vision problems to an inability to function beyond a coma state."

16,000 Unopened Claims Letters Hidden at VA Offices
Rick Maze reports for Army Times: "A new report about Veterans Affairs Department employees squirreling away tens of thousands of unopened letters related to benefits claims is sparking fresh concerns that veterans and their survivors are being cheated out of money."

State Court Hears Challenge to Proposition 8
Sam Ferguson comments for Truthout: "The issue of same-sex marriage was once again in the California Supreme Court Thursday. For three hours, the seven justices of the California Supreme Court grilled attorneys on the constitutionality of Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment restricting marriage to heterosexual couples, passed by voters last November. Though the court held last May that marriage must be extended to same-sex couples under the state's equal protection clause, it now seems reluctant to overturn a constitutional amendment from the voters rebuking the May decision."

Recommended Audio: Fairness in the Media
National Public Radio/KCBX Community Radio: Fairness: The Senate voted last week to ban the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine. The long-defunct broadcasting regulation that was taken off the books in 1987. The ban will also prohibit the Federal Communications Commission from encouraging broadcasters to air local news and information, children's programming and public safety alerts. Executive director of Free Press Josh Silver, says the move assures, "that all Americans benefit when there is diverse media ownership."

Rushing Towards Irrelevance
Joe Conason writes for Truthdig.com: "Once upon a time, conservatives liked to say that 'ideas matter.' They attributed this pithy slogan to Ayn Rand, venerated author of 'Atlas Shrugged' and 'The Virtue of Selfishness,' and tried to live by it, generating books, papers and legislative proposals by the dozen. Although many of their theories later proved flimsy, they at least attempted to address real problems with fresh thinking. But ideas no longer matter—and in fact they’re dangerous, according to the maximum leader of the right."

The Danger of Losing Ethnic Media
Sally Lehrman writes for the Boston Globe: "ASIANWEEK, San Francisco's English-language weekly for Asian Americans, and San Francisco Bay View, which has served the black community there for three decades, both have dumped their print editions. Siglo21, a Spanish-language paper published in Lawrence, is returning to publishing weekly after three months as a daily due to declining advertising. Ming Pao Daily in New York will shut down entirely, while Hoy New York abandoned print at the end of last year. At the venerable Ebony and Jet in Chicago, all employees must reapply for their jobs - that is, the jobs that remain."

Get Off the Bus
Amanda Michel writes for the Columbia Journalism Review: The pro-am journalism experiment OffTheBus demonstrates that the "mass amateurization" of journalism can provide real breakthroughs -- not only in the democratization of news and information, but also in bolstering the role of the media as a pillar of democracy.

American's Digital Divide: Millions in American Have Inferior Internet Access
Megan Tady, Internet for Everyone, writes for AlterNet: "don’t have access to high-speed Internet. According to a July 2007 study, 30 percent or more of the state's population in 21 rural counties did not have high-speed Internet connectivity. In many cases, telephone and cable companies have refused to provide service to people living in the remote and rural areas of the state, while some people are simply priced out of buying expensive broadband service."

Harlots High and Low: A Foul Saga in the History of Netwook TV
Alexander Cockburn writes for CounterPunch: "When I was a lad of fourteen, at school in Scotland, a news mogul tycoon called Roy Thompson used five simple words to describe the higher purpose of commercial television. 1955 was the year the BBC lost its monopoly on TV provision in Britain. The government handed out licenses to new broadcasting companies which, unlike the BBC, could run ads. This privilege was, Thompson publicly rejoiced, 'a license to print money.'”