Representative George Miller is waging a lonely war against powerful enemies. He's trying to reform the 401(k) system, a system that most on Wall Street don't want reformed.
The key to Miller's plan is to force 401(k) providers to disclose their fees in plain English. If you don't think this is important, consider that those fees can eat up 75% of your potential retirement savings.

If you look at the system, basically what you have is working families making the conscious decision every month to try to save some money for retirement. Then along comes people managing those funds for them and they start dipping into those funds for fees that are really not in the best interest of those savers. So, you have elite financial managers getting rich off the back of middle-class working people. The last thing they really want is transparency.

"The 401(k) system today in the United States has been an acknowledged failure."
- Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College's Carroll School of Management.

All these fees are a mystery to an overwhelming majority of Americans.

"I die like a true blue rebel. Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize."
- Joe Hill's last written words

Every successful popular movement has its legendary, or near legendary, characters. People, or groups, who seemed bigger than life, and in the end must be sacrificed to the cause. The civil rights movement had Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. The American Revolution had Nathan Hale.

For the labor movement the group that fit that role was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). While the roll-call of the IWW is filled with legendary characters, far more than can be written in anything less than a book, one character stands out above them all - Joe Hill.

So much has been made of the subprime mortgage meltdown that you would think it was almost totally responsible for the economic collapse, and that once the subprime problem was fixed then the worst would be over.

Unfortunately nothing could be further from the truth, despite hitting new highs in foreclosure listing. Instead it was the first round of a three part collapse, and we are on the edge of the second round.
I will demonstrate with a fantastic series of charts below, most of them were created by the T2 Partners.

The public didn't pay much attention to this comment by Congressman Mark Kirk last week, but they should have.

"It would appear, quietly and with deference and politeness, that China has canceled America's credit card," Kirk told the Committee of 100, a Chinese-American group.

"I'm not sure too many people on Capitol Hill realize that this is now happening," he said.

It's hard to believe when you consider that China has bought over $1 Trillion of our debt, and the largest single-year purchase was 2008.

But now it appears that Mark Kirk knew what he was talking about.

"There will come a time where the lack of Chinese participation may have a significant impact," Kirk said.

Paul Krugman recently pointed out that wages are falling across America. A week earlier the Treasury Department reported that tax revenue was collapsing at a 14% rate.

It's easy to see the correlation between these two trends. But what do they have to do with this statement? Everything.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) has been battling the banks the last few weeks in an effort to get 60 votes lined up for bankruptcy reform. He's losing.