Below is a link to Louis Proyect's video of a workship in the Left Forum 2011. You get to watch Doug as moderator with Mark Weisbrot on the right and David Harvey on the left:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/left-forum-2011-part-three/
One questioner at the end asked for the People's Financial Crisis, by which he meant, the plain language version. Michael Hudson does a pretty good job of that, if you ignore his supenders and gloomy overkill. Harvey is ... well I would have like to listen to some inter-panel discussion, especially from Harvey. I understand the question because Weisbrot was a little too economics speak and Harvey was too high end. Doug was about right for the questioner--as noted by somebody in the audience.
I went through a couple of Weisbrot's columns at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Not near cynical enough to match the intentional policy direction of the US political economy, i.e plan IMF America. Harvey calls this transfering the costs of reproduction, which capital has no intention of including in its cost of production. Using Harvey's terminology, there was at one time taxing the capitalist class, to re-distribute money to pick up those costs of reproduction, i.e. health, education and welfare. Now those costs are to be carried by the working and fading middle, so that they carry those costs within their households. Since that is impossible, the broad mass go into debt to pay those costs.
The other cost that Harvey mentioned were the environmental costs, which are more than evident in the BP and Fukushima disasters. The whole motive behind the massive government cover-ups in both cases was to hide those costs and make it impossible for the public to extract those costs from those responsible. The current attack on the EPA is to defund it so that it can't monitor the environmental costs of carbon based energy production.
CG