"You can't just have homeowners pay for the mess that the banks have made; not just of our finance system, it's becoming clear that they've made a mess of our private property system in this country," says Marcy Wheeler, who's been blogging the House and Senate hearings on the foreclosure crisis at her FireDogLake blog, and joins us via Skype to discuss the situation.

And while hearings on Capitol Hill look into what the banks have done to everyday people, the discussion of Bush administration torture and unlawful detention goes on--Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was convicted of one of the 285 counts he was tried for, in a civilian court. Marcy points out that the trial might have gone differently if much of the evidence in the case hadn't been obtained through torture.

We need to take control of the new computer networking tools all around us, argues author and thinker Douglas Rushkoff, or else we'll wind up at the mercy of those who do take control. That's part of the argument Rushkoff makes in his new book, Program or Be Programmed, out now from our friends at OR Books.

With some basic computer and programming literacy, Rushkoff notes, we can take control of our lives, create value for ourselves, and perhaps let the big institutions that think they control us, from banks to media moguls, just wither away.

Finally, one of those big institutions went "public" today--GM stock is back on the stock markets, the bankruptcy and bailouts apparently a success. But not so fast, say some, and Laura has some thoughts about who's really paying the price.