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This week on Uprising:

* Who Will Win the Democratic Nomination, and Does it Even Matter?
* Empire Notes with Rahul Mahajan – on Ralph Nader
* American Women Under the Bush Regime and Beyond
* Round table Discussion on Global and Local Women’s Rights featuring women from Iran, El Salvador, Philippines, and the US.

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Who Will Win the Democratic Nomination and Does it Even Matter?

GUEST: Robert Jensen, professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin

Hillary Clinton made a come back this past Tuesday in Texas, Ohio, and Rhode Island, beating her rival Barack Obama in those states for the Democratic Presidential nomination. Even though Obama only won in Vermont this week, his delegate count still remains almost 100 more than Clinton’s. In Texas, a third of the delegates were decided by caucus after the polls closed, handing Obama a victory there. In fact, Clinton had a net gain of only 4 delegates in Texas and five in Rhode Island. Her victory in Ohio netted her 74 delegates to Obama’s 65. A candidate needs 2,025 national convention delegates to win the Democratic presidential nomination. The next major primary elections are several weeks away, resulting in a contest that has gone on much longer than anyone expected. Meanwhile John McCain predictably swept all four states that were voting on Tuesday to clinch the Republican party nomination for President. While much of the mainstream media is breathlessly crunching delegate numbers and dissecting campaign strategies, the question for grassroots social justice activists remains: does it matter who wins the nomination?

Empire Notes on Ralph Nader

GUEST: Rahul Mahajan, author of Full Spectrum Dominance and The New Crusade

Empire Notes are weekly commentaries filed by Rahul Mahajan, author of Full Spectrum Dominance and The New Crusade. Today’s commentary is about Ralph Nader.

Empire Notes is online at www.empirenotes.org.

American Women Under the Bush Regime and Beyond

GUESTS: Avis Jones DeWeever, Director of the Research, Public Policy and Information Center at the National Council of Negro Women, Vicky Lovell, Director of Employment and Work/Life Programs at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research

A hundred years ago on Saturday, 15,000 women workers in the so-called “needle trades,” marched through New York City’s Lower East Side, protesting child labor and sweatshop conditions, and demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights. Today, that event in 1908 signifies the first major action marking International Women’s Day. On March 8th of every year thousands of women around the world organize events celebrating women’s rights and acknowledging the work that remains to be done to achieve women’s equality. Today we spend the rest of the hour talking to women from all over the world and right here at home, commemorating International Women’s Day. We’ll hear from activists, academics, artists, and workers.

Every year on International Women’s Day, the media cites the progress made in women’s rights globally. While there is still a long way to go, progress we are told, even if slow, is apparently moving in the right direction. But what if, in reality, we are not making progress? Taking a look at women’s actual economic power, American women’s wages in the past year have fallen, not only in absolute terms, but also compared to men’s wages. A report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research shows that progress in closing the gender wage gap has slowed considerably since 1990. Meanwhile women under the Bush regime have suffered other setbacks too, including a serious erosion of the right to an abortion, and funding for family planning and essential social services for poor women.

Round table Discussion on Global and Local Women’s Rights

GUESTS: Sussan Golmohammadi, Iranian women’s rights activist, Dr. Annalisa Enrile, National Chairperson of the Gabriela Network and a Professor at the USC School of Social Work, Claudia Mercado, independent film maker and co-founder of Mujeres de Maiz, InLakEch and Womyn Image Maker; Isaura Rivera Board Member and Assistant Coordinator with the FMLN del Sur de California; Sidney Ross Risden, a registered nurse with the Global Women’s Strike

In many countries around the world, including China, Cuba, Russia, and Vietnam, International Women’s Day is an official holiday. Here in the US, American women in Chicago revived the annual celebration in 1968. Across the country, women are organizing large and small events. We spend the rest of the hour taking a look at the state of women’s rights globally and locally with a round-table of five impressive women.

We end the show with a reading by artist Claudia Mercado.

Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day

“We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all the civil and political rights that belong to citizens of the United States, be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever.” — Susan B. Anthony, Declaration of Rights for Women, July 1876