Cate Vojdik
AC360° Writer

All this week, 360 will be traveling across the country, On the Road to Rescue. For the next five days, in five different cities, Anderson will report on how Americans hit by the economic crisis are finding ways to pull through. He’ll talk to people on the ground about their hopes, challenges and strategies.

The idea is to connect the big picture issues of the economic crisis to the snapshots on the ground - minus the partisan noise you’ll find elsewhere. We believe knowledge is power; the more information you have the more control you’ll have over your families’ futures.

Tonight, Anderson is in Los Angeles, where unemployment has surged four percent since October – to 12 percent. Anderson talked with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who wants the federal government to give nearly $7 billion in stimulus money directly to his city, bypassing the state government. Why? He fears state officials will use the money for deficit reduction rather than job creation. At the very least, he says, it will take longer for the money to reach his city if it has to wind its way through state channels.

Mayor Villaraigosa would use some of the $7 billion to buy “green trucks” built by a local company. Anderson will show us these electric trucks plus the port where some of them would be used. He’ll also examine Villaraigosa’s contention that giving stimulus money directly to cities will help speed recovery.

Anderson also goes to the frontlines of the battle against gangs. He’ll introduce us to Gregory Thomas, the co-founder of a local gang-prevention group in Watts, who hopes to use stimulus money to create jobs and job-training programs while hiring dozens of gang outreach workers. An estimated 400 gangs operate in and around L.A., and last year nearly half of all homicides in the city were gang-related.

A reverend who heads up the city’s task force on gang prevention told Anderson he’s convinced that even a small amount of stimulus money would have a big impact in Watts. As he puts it: ”I mean surely if we can still pay out bonuses to bankers on wall street, it seems to me we can use some of these dollars to invest in poor community’s that have been overlooked and over-passed for decades.”

Can the fight against gangs create jobs and helped fuel the recovery? We’ll dig deeper.

We’ll also spend some time tonight on the huge new wave of outrage that AIG has unleashed with its latest bonus payouts – to employees in the very division that nearly sunk the giant company. President Obama has told Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to use all legal means to stop the payments or get the money back. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is also taking action. But what can they actually do? Is there a way to get the billions of taxpayer dollars back?

We’ll also take a closer look at the Obama administrations plans to help small businesses. Plus, we’ve pulled together a panel of experts who say that recessions can actually be good for entrepreneurs. Remember the saying, “Necessity is the mother of invention”? More on that tonight.

After L.A. we head to New Orleans, Detroit, New York and Miami. Should be a fascinating week.

See you tonight at 10 p.m. eastern.