Gap Between Race and Wealth Widens

Published on Mar 8, 2013
Despite platitudes about living in a race-blind society, a new study from Brandeis University shows that the wealth gap between Whites and Blacks tripled in the last 25 years. The study surveyed 1,700 households of working age between 1984 and 2009. There’s no better to see how wealth and race meet face-to-face than Washington, DC. RT producer Gavino Garay sits down with Maurice Jackson, Professor of African American Studies at Georgetown University, to understand why, after so many years of racial ‘equality,’ Blacks are nowhere near the same socioeconomic status as Whites.

YouTube Spawns Asian-American Celebrities

Published on Feb 28, 2013
From movies and TV shows to songs on the radio, there have been fewer opportunities in traditional media for Asian-American entertainers. But the Internet, especially YouTube, has changed that. Elizabeth Lee reports from Los Angeles, a place that has seen an explosion of Asian-American YouTube celebrities.

Fracking Hell? South Africa’s Gas Dilemma

Published on Feb 20, 2013
Caught between the promise of prosperity that natural gas extraction in the Karoo Basin might bring and concerns about environmental and health impacts, citizen resistance to fracking is growing in the Republic of South Africa. Earth Focus correspondent Jeff Barbee reports.

Ronnie Dunn – Cost Of Livin’ (2011)

LYRICS
Everythin’ to know about me
Is written on this page
A number you can reach me
My social and my age

Yes, I served in the army
It’s where I learned to shoot
Eighteen months in the desert
Pourin’ sand out of my boots

No, I’ve never been convicted of a crime
I could start this job at any time

I got a strong back, steel toes
I rarely call in sick, a good truck
What I don’t know I catch on real quick
I work weekends, if I have to, nights and holidays

Give you forty and then some
Whatever it takes
Three dollars and change at the pump
The cost of livin’s high and goin’ up

I put Robert down as a reference
He’s known me all my life
We attend the same church
He introduced me to my wife

I gave my last job everythin’
Before it headed south
Took the shoes off of my children’s feet
Food out of their mouths

Yesterday my folks offered to help
But they’re barely gettin’ by themselves

I got a strong back, steel toes
I rarely call in sick, a good truck
What I don’t know I catch on real quick
I work weekends, if I have to, nights and holidays

Give you forty and then some
Whatever it takes
Three dollars and change at the pump
The cost of livin’s high and goin’ up

I’m sure a hundred others have applied
But rumor has it you’re only takin’ five

I got a strong back, steel toes
I’m handy with a wrench
There’s nothin’ I can’t drive
There’s nothin’ I can’t fix

I work sunup to sundown
Ain’t too proud to sweep the floors
The bank has started callin’
And the wolves are at my door

Three dollars and change at the pump
The cost of livin’s high and goin’ up

Chinese ‘Apartheid’? Hukou System Comes Under Fire

Published on Feb 1, 2013
Hukou, China’s controversial household registration system, was originally designed to monitor the population and limit mass migration from the countryside to major cities. LinkAsia contributor Mark Dreyer reports that Chinese have taken to social media to voice their complaints about the injustice of the houkou system.

Watch more at http://linkasia.org.

IMAGE: Zhan Haite poses for a picture at home in Shanghai, December 21, 2012. Police broke up a small protest in Beijing on Saturday calling for reform of China’s divisive household registration system, an action prompted by a Shanghai schoolgirl’s widely publicized plea for equal access to the education system:

DC School Delivers a Good Education for African-Americans Girls

Published on Feb 2, 2013
A school in Washington DC is making a difference for young African-American girls. Many of their families live below the poverty line of $35,000 for a family of four, in communities where more than half of all students drop out before they reach high school. VOA’s Chris Simkins has more on how this special school is turning around the lives of girls.

Chicken McNuggets and Exploitation on The Wire – capitalism, conflict theory

D’Angelo Barksdale: Now you think Ronald McDonald gonna go down to the basement and say, “Hey Mr. Nugget—you the bomb. We sellin’ chicken faster than you can tear the bone out. So I’m gonna write my clowny ass name on this fat-ass check for you.”

Shit. Man, the nigga who invented them things? Still working in the basement for regular wage, thinking of some shit to make the fries taste better or some shit like that. Believe.

Euro-Crisis: Separatist Movements Mount

Published on Nov 11, 2012 by deutschewelleenglish
It’s tough times in the EU. In the face of stunning austerity, separatist movements are blossoming all across the Union. They believe, they would do better on their own. Is this the end of unity? It’s tough times in the EU. In the face of stunning austerity, separatist movements are blossoming all across the Union. They believe, they would do better on their own. Is this the end of unity?

Peru’s forcibly sterilised seek justice

Published on Mar 10, 2012 by AlJazeeraEnglish
After years of denying any wrongdoing, Peru has reopened investigation into forcible sterilisation of women, what human rights groups say was a crime against humanity.

During the 1990s, more than 300,000 women were pressured into being sterilised by the government.

Doctors and nurses under Alberto Fujimori’s administration, between 1996 and 2000, were assigned monthly quotas and given bonuses based on the number of sterilisations they performed.

Al Jazeera’s Latin America Editor Lucia Newman reports from Anta on the women’s quest for justice.

Improving access to microfinance for rural Kenyans

Published on Oct 10, 2012 by kenyacitizentv
Microfinance Institutions in the country are seeking to increase financial access by targeting the unbanked rural population. The institutions intend to leverage on modern solutions provided through the use of cell phones to promote services especially to women in rural areas. The initiative comes at a time when most financial institutions have concentrated on providing banking services to urban populations and ignored the rural communities.

The Impact of India’s Caste System on Women – Half the Sky

Published on Sep 18, 2012 by IndependentLens

Urmi Basu, the founder of New Light, explains to America Ferrera the caste system in India and how women end up in prostitution.

MEGAPOST: Big Brothers Big Sisters – Start Something Web Series

BBBS Start Something Trailer

Big Brothers Big Sisters begins a new mentor program and online reality series following the lives of six matches in the Newark, NJ area. In this trailer you can meet the matches, see their challenges, celebrate their successes and start something by sharing the video.

Greek art scene invigorated by crisis

Published on Aug 10, 2012 by AlJazeeraEnglish

The Greek economic crisis has inevitably affected the country’s commercial art sales. Yet as Al Jazeera’s Jacky Rowland reports from Athens, times of social turmoil can also fuel creative industries.

Lil Wayne – How To Love (2011)

Wikipedia – How To Love

The video first shows a young woman deciding to not get an abortion and running out of the hospital. Her child is born a girl and lives through tough times with her single mother, due to her father being in jail. When the girl is an adolescent, her mother’s boyfriend molests her. When she becomes a teenager, she is promiscuous. When she became an adult, she has two children and soon becomes a stripper. A customer from the strip club pays her to have sex with him and she is diagnosed with HIV. She runs out of the hospital, like her mother at the beginning of the video. The music video then rewinds and shows a different life that the girl could have lived. Her mother would move into her own mother’s house and even marry a better man, with her little daughter as flower girl. In the end, the daughter grows up to be smarter and more mature, and graduates from high school, making her mother and grandmother proud. When she becomes an adult, she is in the same hospital again awaiting a test result and the doctor tells her she is pregnant, she is happy and hugs her mother, thanking her for teaching her “how to love.”

A Factory Grows in Haiti