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This week on Uprising:

* Obama Defends Financial Rescue Plan
* Black Agenda Report: Comparing Iraq and Afghanistan
* Ten Years After the US/NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia
* Empire Notes on Afghanistan and the US Economy
* Native American/Native Alaska Women Suffer Epidemic Rapes

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Obama Defends Financial Rescue Plan

President Obama went on the defensive this past week in his second prime-time news conference defending his Treasury Secretary’s plan to save the financial sector with $1 trillion of tax payer money. The President took questions from reporters for nearly an hour during a conference that almost entirely focused on the economy. He was grilled about the bonuses received by AIG executives, the growing budget deficit, health care, and other issues. Geithner’s so-called private-public partnership would give investors federal money to buy up toxic assets. Many have criticized the plan as relying on investor greed as a fuel to fix the economy. But if the plan works, theoretically banks would be able to free themselves of enough bad debt to be able to make good loans. That’s a big “if” however. Meanwhile the President is planning an online town-hall style meeting on the economy tomorrow evening on the White House’s website at whitehouse.gov.

GUEST: Dr. Richard Wolff, professor of Economics at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, featured in a new film by the Media Education Foundation called Capitalism Hits the Fan

Black Agenda Report: Comparing Iraq and Afghanistan

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

Visit www.blackagendareport.com for more information.

Ten Years After the US/NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia

An anniversary that went almost entirely unnoticed in the US press this past week marked a war that sought to legitimize humanitarian military intervention in the modern world. Ten years ago on Tuesday March 24th, forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO, began a 78-day bombing campaign targeted the Balkan nation, known as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, in the name of humanitarian intervention. Then Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was accused of carrying out a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing, a term that became popular as a result, against ethnic Albanians. The NATO bombing campaign resulted in 2000 deaths, the displacement of a million people, and a breaking up of the entire country into Serbia, Montenegro, and the state of Kosovo. Kosovo was administered by NATO and the UN until a year ago when it declared independence. The Serbian government, which remains defiant over Kosovo, marked the 10th anniversary of the war by sounding air raid sirens, and observing a moment of silence in classrooms. A thousand nationalist youth gathered in the Serbian capital of Belgrade demanding weapons; twenty four were arrested. Meanwhile, members of the Balkan diaspora, identifying themselves as anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist activists of diverse backgrounds, released a strongly-worded statement criticizing the war and its devastating aftermath.

GUEST: Tamara Vukov, Global Balkans Network

Read the statement on the 10th anniversary of the Kosovo war by the Global Balkans Network here: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/gbn240309.html

Empire Notes on Afghanistan and the US Economy

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

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

Visit www.empirenotes.org for more information.

Native American/Native Alaska Women Suffer Epidemic Rapes

A Congressional subcommittee held a hearing earlier in the week featuring testimony by a leading expert on sexual violence against Indigenous women in the U.S. Charon Asetoyer, executive director of the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center addressed a disturbing epidemic of sexual violence affecting one out of three Native American and Alaska Native women and stressed the need to create Sexual assault Nurse Examiner programs in all Indian Health Service hospitals. According to the US Dept. of Justice’s own statistics, Native American and Alaska Native women are nearly three times more likely to be raped than women in the US in general. Too often Native American victims of rape have to go through a maze of federal, state, tribal and local laws to achieve any justice at all, while the agencies responsible for seeking justice on their behalf are severely underfunded and inadequate. Federal law limits the criminal sentences that tribal courts can impose and prohibits tribal courts from trying non-Indian suspects – even though data collected by the Department of Justice shows that up to 86% of perpetrators are non-Indian.

GUEST: Charon Asetoyer, Executive Director of the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center.

Read Amnesty International’s Report, Maze of Injustice here: http://www.amnestyusa.org/women/maze/report.pdf.

Email messages to Senator Dianne Feinstein can be sent here: http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ContactUs.EmailMe. Or call Senator Feinstein at (202) 224-3841.

Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day

“Rape is the only crime in which the victim becomes the accused.” — Freda Adler