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This week on Uprising:

* Yemen Revolution at Tipping Point, While Libya Bombing Continues
* How Tax Preparers Fleece The Poor
* Triangle: The Fire That Changed America: 100th Anniversary Special

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Yemen Revolution at Tipping Point, While Libya Bombing Continues

Yet another revolution in the Middle East is on the verge of overturning a dictatorial government. Demonstrations in the Gulf state of Yemen on March 21st reached a critical mass with tens of thousands of people showing up in city centers across the country demanding the resignation of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The protests provided the impetus for as many as a dozen top military commanders to defect and join the pro-democracy activists. Among them was General Ali Mohsen Al Ahmar, a close confidante of the president. Despite this the Yemeni Defense Minister vowed publicly that the military would defend President Saleh from any “coup against democracy.” However, the editor-in-chief of the Yemen Post newspaper, Hakim Al Masmari called this moment “game over for Saleh,” and went as far as to say “we predict the end of this regime in the next 24 hours.” Saleh has offered to step down a year earlier than he had planned to but refused to resign immediately. Despite protests on Friday March 25th ballooning, President Saleh has managed to cling to power.

Meanwhile, in Libya, the revolution is unfolding under very different circumstances. For more than a week now, US and NATO planes have been bombing Muammar Qaddafi’s strongholds in Libya as per a UN resolution backed by the Libyan opposition. Despite the fact that Libyan activists are largely in favor of the strikes to stave off further massacres, the American antiwar movement is dismayed at this third war front that has unexpectedly opened up in addition to Afghanistan and Iraq. Just Foreign Policy’s Robert Naiman is calling on Congress to debate the strikes on Libya. The Progressive’s Matthew Rothschild has called Obama’s actions “unconstitutional, naïve, and hypocritical.” Veteran journalist and author Robert Parry has pointed out the “double standards” and “selective outrage” of U.S. foreign policy. And, my guest Phyllis Bennis said “The legitimacy of the Libyan protesters’ demand does not mean that the decision by the United Nations and the powerful countries behind it was legitimate as well.”

GUEST: Phyllis Bennis, fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, Bennis is author of “Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN.”

How Tax Preparers Fleece The Poor

Every afternoon when I drive home from work, going up Lake Avenue in Pasadena, I’m treated to a dancing Statue of Liberty dressed in garish green, advertising Liberty Tax Preparation. It’s not just H&R Block outlets any more – tax preparation store-fronts have proliferated in the last few years. But even though everyone has to file taxes, these tax-preparers are ominously located in poor, often minority neighborhoods, tucked somewhere between the Rent-A-Center and the Pay-Day Loan centers. In a detailed investigative report, journalist Gary Rivlin exposes these tax-prep chains in the latest issue of Mother Jones magazine. While it should hardly come as a surprise that there is an element of exploiting the poor at work, what is shocking is how lucrative a business it is to prepare people’s taxes. Rivlin reveals that what brings the working poor in through the doors of these store-fronts is the promise of an upfront loan based on their returns. Taxes filed after January 15th usually yield IRS returns in 15 days. But customers desperate for cash are led to believe they could have to wait weeks for it, unless they get an instant loan in the amount of their return minus a bunch of fees. Many banks working with the tax preparers were involved in the sub-prime mortgage crisis, and now even private equity firms and hedge funds are being lured by the promise of easy profit. It’s not the loans that make the tax-preparers their money however – it’s the actual tax return filing enabling these companies to charge someone upwards of $300 for a 10-minute data entry task into a piece of software.

GUEST: Gary Rivlin, Freelance journalist, a former staff writer at the NY Times, his work has appeared in the Sunday Times Magazine, Salon, and Newsweek, and he is the author of BROKE USA, which comes out in paperback in June.

Find Gary Rivlin’s article at http://motherjones.com

Triangle: The Fire Than Changed America

Friday March 25th 2011 marks the 100th anniversary of the terrible tragedy that sparked a movement: the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York. The deadliest industrial accident in the history of the city resulted in the deaths of 146 young, mostly immigrant women. It marked a moment that transformed labor relations in America, and strengthened unions and labor laws. Given the recent uprisings in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and many other states, against the Republican and corporate attacks on workers rights it is apt that we revisit the story of the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory Fire in this re-broadcast of the show from Labor Day in 2003, just weeks after Uprising was launched.

GUEST: David Von Drehle, journalist and author of Triangle: The Fire that Changed America

Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day

“That’s the whole trouble of this fire … the executives with a couple of steps could have opened the door. But they thought they were better than the working people. It’s not fair because material, money, is more important here than everything.” — Rose Friedman, a survivor of the Triangle Fire who died in 2001