Our weekly edition is a nationally syndicated one-hour digest of the best of our daily coverage.

Audio Stream | Podcast | Mp3 Download

This week on Uprising:

* Afghan Activist Calls for an End to US Occupation
* Media Coverage of Shriver Report Lauds Women’s Progress, Ignores Shocking Disparities
* Black Agenda Report: The Healthcare Debate
* Robert Jensen on Grassroots Organizing in the Age of Obama

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Afghan Activist Calls for an End to US Occupation

Afghanistan’s incumbent president Hamid Karzai has conceded to a runoff election on November 7th, responding to heavy international and US pressure. This summer’s presidential election was marred by rampant vote fraud in which both Karzai and his closest rival Abdullah Abdullah were implicated. Karzai had for weeks maintained that he won an outright runoff-proof majority, and even as late as a few days ago, was refusing to concede. At a Kabul press conference on Tuesday with Senator John Kerry, Karzai called upon Afghans to show up to the polls a second time this year. Kerry heads up the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee and has spoken out against increasing US troop numbers in Afghanistan until a government credible to the Afghan people is elected. But Secretary of State Hillary Clinton openly admitted last week that she expected Karzai to win a runoff election. The White House is currently reviewing its Afghanistan strategy and debating whether or not to send more troops to a war that has passed the 8 year mark. General Stanley McChrystal, the top US and NATO commander in Afghanistan wants to add 40,000 new US troops to the approximately 100,000 US and NATO forces currently there. Meanwhile Vice President Joe Biden is advising the President to preserve troop levels at the current number, and narrow the war to counterinsurgency operations along the border with Pakistan. President Obama got some different advice recently at fundraiser in San Francisco when Codepink co-founder Jodie Evans delivered thousands of signatures of Afghan women asking for no new troops and for a complete exit from the country after a reconciliation process. A CNN/opinion research poll released on Monday revealed that 52% of Americans see the Afghanistan war as similar to the Vietnam war.

As the White House debates on how best to continue the war, an Afghan women’s rights activist who goes by the name Zoya, is touring the United States with the message that the occupation must end and that the US is not acting in the interests of ordinary Afghans. Zoya is a member of the intrepid underground women’s organization RAWA, Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, whom I’ve been working with for many years. She will be speaking at several events this week in the Southern California area: Eagle Rock on Wednesday and Pasadena and Venice on Thursday.

GUEST: Zoya, a member of RAWA

Media Coverage of Shriver Report Lauds Women’s Progress, Ignores Shocking Disparities

This past week the NBC network is teaming up with California First Lady Maria Shriver to present a week of television programming on the state of 21st Century American women. The programming will be based on a new report called The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything.” The Shriver Report reveals that for the first time in US history half of all workers are women, and that mothers are the primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of families. And yet, wage parity between the sexes is a long way off. Taking a look at the consequences of this dramatic socio-economic shift the report hopes to shape new policies to address the modern American family. There is also a deep look at the need for family-friendly benefits, child care and elder care. Also highlighted is the crucial role of immigrant women in the low-paying jobs of housekeeping and childcare which enable American women to enter the workforce at their expense, and the disproportionate ill-effects of the nation’s private health insurance system on women. The Shriver Report is being heralded by the media as a major marker of women’s progress and the closure of the gender gap. But, according to investigative reporter Wendy Norris, the report’s disturbing disparities in women’s well being are being downplayed or completely ignored.

GUEST: Wendy Norris, investigative reporter based in Denver, Colorado, working on assignment for RH Reality Check, editor and founder of unbossed.com.

Read Wendy Norris’ article here: http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/10/20/
media-ignores-womens-health-care-disparities-shriver-report

Read the Shriver Report here: http://www.awomansnation.com

Black Agenda Report: The Healthcare Debate

Glen Ford is a writer and radio commentator and the Executive Editor of The Black Agenda Report. This week’s commentary is on the health care debate.

Visit www.blackagendareport.com for more information.

Robert Jensen on Grassroots Organizing in the Age of Obama

The campaign to elect President Obama last year actively engaged millions of Americans who were previously indifferent or alienated from the political process. But just a mere 9 months after his inauguration, a rightwing backlash hostile to everything Obama-related, seems to have out-organized progressives. Obama’s election campaign infrastructure has remorphed itself into a group called Organizing for America, firing off emails to millions of supporters around the country. Only recently did OfA seem to enjoy a successful mobilization with hundreds of thousands of people making phone calls to support a publicly funded optional healthcare system. Does the future of the progressive movement lie in a liberal president’s ability to mobilize it for his political agenda? Or do progressives need to return to the historically effective approach to activism?

GUEST: Robert Jensen, Professor of Journalism at University of Texas at Austin, and author of many books including Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity, Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege, and his latest All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice.

Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day

“Authenticity comes when your thoughts, your words, and your deeds have some relations to each other. It comes when there’s a real organic relationship between the way you think, the way you talk, and the way you act. You have to fight for authenticity all the time in this world, and if you don’t fight for it you will get derailed.” – Abe Osheroff in an interview with Robert Jensen