Economic and financial issues needn't be esoteric and impenetrable.  These issues impact on regular Americans' lives, like the unemployment crisis, financial industry crimes, illegal foreclosures, etc.

There are many progressive economists, like Dean Baker, James Galbraith, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz who explain these important issues in plain English, clearly and understandably.

Paul Rosenberg at Open Left comments on Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, making economic policy simple for non-economists.

"The broad outlines of economic policy are not really that complicated or hard to understand.  Don't believe me?  Well, just listen to Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz as interviewed on Democracy Now! Wednesday, as he sheds light on a series of big topics that have been the subjects of far more heat than light.  First, on the newly-hot-again topic of foreclosures:

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning economist, professor at Columbia University. His book is out in paperback, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy.

So, just to summarize, you are for a national moratorium on foreclosures.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: I think--inevitably, I think we have to be moving towards that. And the reason is very simple. There were such--the bad practices were so rife, the inequities were so rife, the fraudulent behavior was so common, that at this point we don't know what is a valid mortgage and not. And the consequences of throwing somebody out of their home, when they shouldn't be, are hard to reverse. I mean, just imagine what it does to the family--education of the kids are interrupted--what it does to the community. So, when we have to balance the injustices--and life is unfortunately always balancing one side versus the other--and where will their mistakes be easily reversed and where not? My view is, if we keep them in the homes for a little longer, they owe the money--they still owe the money, that doesn't let them off the hook--but what we're saying is we're not going to speed up this process of-where there's the serious risk of an inequity that will not be easily compensated for.

"Who can argue with that when it's put so simply and directly?  Answer: No one.  Which is why there's so much invested in making sure that it's never put so simply and directly.  That's sort of the pattern that's established throughout this interview." 

(Read or listen to that entire interview on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman here.)

"This is all really incredibly simple in its basic logic.  That doesn't mean there aren't complexities as you drill down into the details.  But the big picture logic is both straight-forward and progressive.  There is no reason at all that Obama should not have been listening to Stiglitz or someone else like him, such as Jamie Galbraith.  We've already been through this once back in the Great Depression.  There's simply no reason at all to be trying the failed policies of Hoover and Melon all over again, while turning our backs on Roosevelt and Keynes."

Stiglitz, in another wide-ranging interview on Daily Finance, said: "families are just as important as corporations" and regarding Wall Street bankers and other corporate criminals, "I think we ought to go do what we did in the S&L [crisis] and actually put many of these guys in prison,"