This interview with Rachel Maddow explains why we need the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Elizabeth Warren explains that this is also part of a bigger picture.

You may want to catch one of the showings of the video

Elizabeth Warren at MNW Alliance 01/02/2012

Elizabeth Warren, Democratic Candidate for U.S. Senate, speaking to several hundred people at a meeting of the Middlesex, Norfolk, and Worcester Democratic Alliance on January 2, 2012, in Franklin, MA.

The program will be shown tomorrow (Thursday, April 19) at 10:05am, 2:06pm and 8:05pm.  I believe that it will be on Channel 12, the channel for public programming, public bulletin board (non-profit only) and all non-government community information.

Please spread the word.

If you cannot see one of these screenings or ones that may occur in the future, there is a three part video on YouTube that covers the same event.

• Elizabeth Warren at MNW Alliance 01/02/2012 On Grassroots Government
  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3

The Washington Post has the article Lawmakers consider changing tax breaks on retirement savings.

On Tuesday, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) scheduled a hearing on “tax-favored retirement accounts” that he said was intended to begin “framing the debate” in preparation for tax reform. Aides said Camp also is planning a first-ever examination of about $30 billion worth of expired tax breaks for individuals and corporations that Congress routinely extends, an idea that is also gaining traction in the Senate.

Whenever the Republicans want to frame a debate why is it that they want to smash that frame over the heads of the middle-class?

I may have to coin a new Greenberg’s Law of Closing Tax Loopholes, “When you ask the congress to eliminate tax loopholes, they always give the voters asked for  by eliminating any tax breaks that the those voters might enjoy and leaving the rest of the loopholes alone.”  I think this is their way of teaching us not to ask for closure of tax loopholes, even though they know pretty clearly which loopholes we want closed.  It is not the ones they focus on.

In The Real News article Inequality and Instability, “James K. Galbraith presents his study of the world economy just before the great crisis ”

From the transcript:

GALBRAITH: The book is built on a new body of information or a body of information from which we were able to measure the movement of inequality in the United States and broadly around the world over a period of about 40 years. And by doing that, we were able to make a much closer, I think, more careful comparison than had previously been possible between economic inequality as we measure it and the other things that are known to go on in the economy.

And the most basic finding, which is the one you already mentioned, is that the movement of inequality has been very closely associated in the U.S. and everywhere else with the financialization of the world’s economies and with the rising share of income in the financial sector and in sectors favored by the financial sector, that is to say, in sectors financed by venture capital and credit flows. And so what you see is a phenomenon where inequality becomes a measure of the dependence of economic growth on finance, and therefore on the instability of finance.

I have not been able to find part two of this interview yet. Perhaps it will be posted within the next few days.