Crooks and Liars has the story Why Alan Grayson Was Kept Off Benghazi Committee.

When we look at who makes up the Dems, we notice that there was nobody selected from House Committee on Foreign Affairs, which seemed very odd to me, as well as to others that have also mentioned this.
.
.
.
So why was he included on the committee now? I’ve been checking around since the announcement was made and a source who wishes to remain anonymous said Rep. Steny Hoyer was afraid that Grayson would be too rambunctious for his taste, and so used his power to keep him off the committee — despite the fact that Eliot Engel, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Affairs committee, had already handpicked Rep. Grayson and gave his selection to Nancy Pelosi. Steny Hoyer went crying (to who, we don’t know) and Nancy Pelosi then pulled Grayson from the panel.

I do not think Nancy Pelosi’s pleas for support for Democrats in the House will get any favorable support from me ever again. I don’t know how many times we Democrats can be stabbed in the back by our own leaders and yet be expected to continue to support them.

Naked Capitalism has the post Is the Piketty Enthusiasm Bubble Subsiding? by Yves Smith. Yves has a lot of positive things to say about the book.  I think the following excerpt from her post is a good summary of what is troubling some critics of the Piketty book.

But as Taylor has pointed out in some technical detail, and others have alluded to, there are many reasons other than the invisible hand for r to remain high. Much of this can involve market failure, which Piketty explicitly rejects. See page 424 if you don’t believe me. R greater than g has nothing to do with market imperfections.

James Galbraith opened his review noting that capital meant power. If Piketty’s empirical analyses are right, and r has been persistently high, I’d suggest it reflects the power of the rich, not the natural forces of a free market economy. Higher taxes would help stymie the rich, but so would financial regulations, anti-trust campaigns, and public financing of politics that could minimize their power and privilege.

I’d like to read Piketty’s book with an open mind, but not an empty one.  That is why I wanted to make note of the criticisms.

The Real News Network has an 8 part series.  I have chosen the title of segment 3 that represents what this series is all about.

At the beginning of segment 1, Paul Jay gives an introduction that gives you the sense of what the series will be about.

Baltimore has many distinctions, one of which is not that well known, certainly not outside Baltimore. But Baltimore is the home of the subprime mortgage. It was in the 1990s that the African-American population of Baltimore, and to some extent New York and Chicago, but primarily Baltimore, were targeted to have loans at under-market rate that would later balloon and force people out of their houses.
.
.
.
Tens of thousands of people were thrown out of their houses and millions of dollars lost by homeowners. Of course, when people lose their houses, it’s not just the people in those houses that suffer. For those of you who have seen the show The Wire, one of the reasons you see all of these boarded-up houses in Baltimore is not just because people have been thrown out but because neighborhoods start to deteriorate. As houses are foreclosed on, other houses start not to be able to get loans from banks to get fixed up, and places that were vibrant and real communities wind up half-vacant and you–what begins a process of, more or less, ethnic cleansing.

That’s just one small example how finance exploits all of us. And that’s the subtitle of a new book. And its author is now with me in the studio.

Thanks for joining us.

COSTAS LAPAVITSAS, PROF. ECONOMICS, UNIV. OF LONDON: Pleasure to be here.

JAY: So Costas Lapavitsas is a professor of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He’s a member of Research on Money and Finance (RMF) and the lead author of RMF’s book Crisis in the Eurozone. His previous publications include Social Foundations of Markets, Money and Credit and Political Economy of Money and Finance. His most recent book is Profiting without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All.

The first segment is titled Growing Up in the Greek Police State – Costas Lapavitsas on Reality Asserts Itself (1/8). You may be surprised at the aspects of history that you can learn from the segment. At this point, you can a different picture of the recent history of Greece and how it might connect to the main subject of the series.

The second segment is titled After the Fall of the Dictatorship, I Knew Political Economy was the Key – Lapavitsas on Reality Asserts Itself (2/8).

With the some history of the world and the background of the interviewee out of the way (all very interesting to see and hear about), we get to segment 3 titled The Rise of the Big Banks – Costas Lapavitsas on Reality Asserts Itself (3/8).

Mr. Lapavitsas says that large scale industrialization created the need for massive amounts of capital and big banks, a process that developed an aggressive global capitalism

This is the part where you begin to see how finance and capitalism were qualitatively transformed from its early beginnings to where we are now.

As of the writing of this blog entry on May 23, 2014, only these three segments of the series have been published. I have high hopes for the value of the remaining 5 segments. You can go to the web site for The Real News Network yourself to get the remaining segments as they are published. Although, I wouldn’t be surprised if I blog about those other segments as they come out.

The fourth part of this series is covered in my subsequent post The Financialization of Big Business – Costas Lapavitsas on Reality Asserts Itself (4/8).