The Road From Ruin

As Bishop and Green say in their book, information is a powerful tool. It is hard to solve a problem if you do not know it exists in the first place.

It will not be easy for ordinary citizens to defeat the entrenched interests on Wall Street and in Washington, but things certainly won't change unless we take up the challenge.

As true professionals, business leaders must accept their responsibility to create real, sustainable value.

More people don't have a bank account today than didn't have the right to vote in 1963. If this is not a call for financial literacy as the new civil rights movement, I don't know what is.

Ed Cullen, I am told, was born around 1901, and if he started putting away just $20 a month it would have been about 110 years in 2010. Assuming an interest rate of 5% per year makes, the savings grow to a little over one million dollars.

What Senator Chris Dodd has put on the table will barely scratch the surface, given the changes that are needed to build a regulatory system that actually works.

Sex or money? Condoms or internal rate of return? Which of these highly charged topics and terms would you prefer (or prefer not) to talk to your kids about?

The progressive community can choose to transform the business world from within, or it can try to destroy the corporate sector altogether, as nothing but a harm to society. The choice is up to us.

An open, orthodoxy-free conversation about how we can fix our broken financial system is exactly what we need. Reading The Road From Ruin -- and joining in our month-long discussion about it -- is a great way to start. READ MORE Is Undercover Boss the Most Subversive Show on Television? Undercover Boss is the kind of popular entertainment that can start out as one thing but morph into something that turns a spotlight on just how out of touch America's corporate chiefs are. READ MORE WATCH: Arianna Discusses the Final Push for a Public Option on The Ed Show LISTEN: Arianna Talks About Move Your Money on Public Radio's AirTalk WATCH: Arianna Weighs in on Massa's 'Wasted Hour' with Glenn Beck on AC360