demos

"Paul Ryan's roadmap, which I call the roadmap to ruin, is really an astonishing document that really doubles down on pretty much every single one of the negative economic decisions of the past thirty years that have gotten us into the mess we're in today," says Heather McGhee, Washington bureau director of Demos. Laura caught up with Heather at Frances Fox Piven and Cornel West's Fight Back Teach-In on April 5 to talk budget concerns. Keep an eye out for our in-depth interview with Frances and Cornel later this week! 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.

Orozco joins guest host Ed Ott, a longtime labor activist, and Tahir Duckett of the AFL-CIO's Working America to talk about youth unemployment, why it matters, and how it connects to the student activism springing up around the country. Students across California--and the country--held protests on March 4 against budget cuts that are cutting courses and hiking tuition at state universities. In these videos from New America Media, students and protesters speak out about the state's overspending on war and prisons and underspending on education. Carrie Brunk, executive director of New York Jobs With Justice, joins Ed Ott in the studio to talk about bailouts, corporate subsidies, and why those aren't helping working people on the ground. Brave New Films points out Rush Limbaugh's hypocrisy, and you can join their group on Facebook to help fight right-wing smears. Brandon Jourdan and David Martinez were both held in jail for over 20 hours after filming this footage from a student protest in Oakland on March 4, where students took over an exit ramp on the highway before being rounded up by baton-wielding riot police. Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, tells the Huffington Post Investigative Fund about waste of reconstruction funds in Afghanistan similar to that in Iraq--some $51 billion has been allocated to rebuild and stabilize, but tracking those funds proves next to impossible. Finally, in this latest clip from our friends at the Tactical Technology Collective, we see how personal stories can be used to reach people about issues they may not have been concerned about before.

In the United States, the gap between rich and poor has grown exponentially in recent years. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the number of Americans who do not earn enough to feed themselves and their families. It is likely that some 50 to 60 million Americans, or one in five, are hungry. How is it possible in the land of plenty? And what does the recession reveal about America?s social safety net? Sasha Abramsky, a senior fellow at Demos and the author of Breadline USA: The Hidden Scandal of American Hunger and How to Fix It, Aubretia Edick, a longtime Wal-Mart employee, Franceska Dillella, a mother of three whose struggle to navigate New York?s homeless shelters with her three children was recently profiled in the Indypendent, Mary Brosnahan, Executive Director of the Coalition for the Homeless on why the subject of hunger and homelessness has received so little attention.