Rising Up to Demand Progress

FEATURING ERIC NAING - Our nation and our world are overrun by billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, you’ll hear conversations with changemakers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power. 

This week on Rising Up for Justice, I’m joined by Eric Naing, communications director for Demand Progress, an organization that works to secure progressive policy change by fighting corporate power and holding government accountable to the people.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: Let's get into what Demand Progress is. I gave a very brief one-sentence description, but what are the goals of Demand Progress? What are the main avenues that you work on? 

Eric Naing: I would say that the main avenues that we work on are issues of concentrated corporate power, war, privacy, democracy, and an open internet. And very just broadly and simply, our goal is to see a future where people, and not the corporate interests or establishment elites, are the ones who hold power. And we do that by marshaling the one million affiliated activists we have and also our lobbying work to secure progressive policy changes that improve lives for everyday people. 

So that's a lot of very broad aspects of our lives, government overreach, corporate abuses, that covers most of what we deal with as a society. Let's go into the founding of Demand Progress, specifically because it seems as if it started out more as an organization around internet freedom.