"Financial transactions, institutions and other players could all be made to pay for the correction of the problem for which they were responsible. The only acceptable principle for fiscal adjustment is that the financial sector should bear the entire cost of the crisis it caused…"

In his free 352-page Internet book "Free Culture: How Big Media used technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity," Lawrence Lessing discusses the future of ideas, the fate of the commons in a connected world. This book was published by Penguin Press, New York in 2004.

In honor of the 75th anniversary of the enactment of the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act, the FDR presidential library hosts a public forum to explore in depth the year that Roosevelt transformed the mission of the New Deal. Social security saved tens of millions from abject poverty and early death. James Roosevelt Jr., Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Ferguson, Alan Brinkley and Brigid O'Farrell participated.

James Crotty is an emeritus professor of economics at U Mass in Amherst. Some economists are more worried about deficit than recession. Large financial institutions were rescued. Obama has drunk the Kool-Aid. Double-dip recession will lead to lower investment.

"Misjudgments of this scale arise from a pattern of self-deception best described as "magical thinking." When we think magically, we conjure up beliefs that everyone wants to be like us and that America can accomplish anything out of sheer righteousness.."

"Much of the blame for the staggering electoral losses has to be laid at the feet of the President's economic team, who seems to think that 14 months of near double-digit unemployment is acceptable. “Their primary misjudgment is they did not understand how serious the downturn would be,” says economist Dean Baker, who sounded the warning about the accumulating housing bubble as early as 2002. “Summers, Geithner, Greenspan, Bernanke, none of these guys thought bubbles were a big deal. They expect the economy to bounce back on its own, and if it didn’t, unemployment was not such a big deal either.” As a consequence, Team Obama's main chance to get the economy going again — the stimulus/jobs package — was not big enough. Christina Romer, former head of the Council of Economic Advisers, recommended over a trillion dollars in direct job-creation funding, but the final package contained about half of that. "Summers managed to marginalize alternative views on nearly everything … the size and composition of the stimulus, whether and how to discipline the banksters or do a housing refinance,” says Joel Rogers, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS), the national “high road” strategy center. “He very ably represented Wall Street and the rich against everyone else." But you can’t exactly blame him for success in that. The President declares what economic discussion should be about, and who's in it…"

Washington Irving was an American author best known for his fictional works, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" & "Rip Van Winkle." Andrew Burstein discusses his book, "The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving." Mr. Burstein gives his talk from Washington Irving’s Home, “Sunnyside” in Tarrytown, New York

"We are nearly at the end of our coping mechanisms.. We deregulated and privatized according to the myth of trickle down.. TARP was another example of trickle down that didn't.. Wall Street should help distressed homeowners and small business.. From 1947-73, the economy was working for everyone.."