china

China's new economic plan is a relic of the past. It focuses on raising standards of living. How quaint! When China's leaders unveiled their latest five-year plan recently, they revealed that their focus is on lowering inequality, investing in railroads, and highways and hospitals, and expanding domestic demand through income subsidies. Fancy that! http://www.grittv.org Distributed by Tubemogul.

"What we are seeing is nothing less than an Egyptian Tiananmen Square," says Khaled Fahmy of American University in Cairo. He watched today as bands of armed men descended on peaceful protesters in Cairo, heading for Tahrir Square. Some of the people, who Fahmy called "thugs" rode through crowds on horseback and camelback, trying to drive them back. Mubarak "has burned all his bridges with his people," Fahmy notes via phone from Cairo, and the violence today was a last gasp for the regime. "The one predictable thing about revolutions is that they are unpredictable," notes Benjamin Barber, fellow at Demos and author of Consumed and Jihad vs. McWorld. Barber points out that as revolution rocks the Arab world, each country will find its own solution and destiny. The important thing to note, he says, is that autocratic regimes hollow out their states' civil society, leaving little infrastructure in place for citizens to use to govern themselves. Benjamin joins Laura in studio to discuss the situation in Egypt and to update us on the conflict he wrote about in Jihad vs. McWorld years ago, between consumer capitalism and Islamism. Why can we picture no alternative to the two extremes, when revolution comes? "If Internet freedoms have to be secured with policy then as far as I'm concerned there are no Internet freedoms," says Douglas Rushkoff, author of Program or Be Programmed. He notes that what we've learned from the Internet shutoff in Egypt is that there is too much centralization on the Web, and when people like Joe Lieberman can call Amazon and knock WikiLeaks off their server or convince PayPal not to process their payments anymore, there's too much control. Doug joins us from his home via Skype to talk to us about the problems with the Internet we have, government control over it, and how we can create a 'Net they can't shut down. Distributed by Tubemogul.

"People are still looking at and facing too much pain," says Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who joined Bernie Sanders for part of his eight and a half hour speech against giving tax breaks to millionaires. Brown notes that while the compromise which eventually passed gives some short-term help to American workers, but that the economy will not begin to really recover until Washington turns its focus to jobs--and not just any jobs, but reinvigorated manufacturing jobs. Senator Brown joins us from Washington via Skype to discuss what he sees as the most important priorities for a shrunken Democratic majority in the Senate in the next session of Congress, and particularly why a focus on our trade policy is long overdue.

Though there is little hope for a binding international agreement from the current round of climate talks held by the United Nations in Cancun this week, there is something different about the conversation. Tina Gerhardt reports that countries who are in attendance at the talks aren't talking about future consequences of global climate change, but instead talking about the crises they are suffering right now. From drought to floods, weather patterns are shifting and across the world, people are feeling the pain.Tina is reporting from the Cancun talks this week for The Nation, and she joins us to give us an update on the situation, who's there, who's not, and what, if anything, we can hope for as a result of the talks.The environmental and climate justice movement isn't just about saving polar bears from melting ice, argues writer and 350.org founder Bill McKibben. It's about rebuilding connection and community, changing the way human beings live, and working in solidarity with human rights organizations across the world to improve all of our lives. And the biggest stumbling block to the growth of a global climate justice movement? It's right under our noses: our own Congress.Bill McKibben is a recipient of this year's Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship, and he joins us in studio for a special one-on-one chat with Laura about the state of the climate justice movement, the Cancun talks, Obama's failure to act, and what we can do to change things before it's too late.