To give you the thumbnail sketch, a court-appointed bank examiner spent a year researching the fall of Lehman -- the trigger for the bailout crisis. As it turns out, surprise surprise, the accounting at Lehman was, to put it mildly, shifty... and our guests aren't the only ones asking what did Geithner know and when did he know it?

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism is noting, “The NY Fed, and thus Timothy Geithner, were at a minimum massively derelict...”

Mike Whitney over at CounterPunch is faking disbelief: “Is there really any doubt that Tim Geithner at the New York Fed, or Bernanke knew that Lehman was trading its junk assets to finance its on-going operations?”

If Geithner and Bernanke didn't know what was going on at Lehman, that's bad. If they knew, that's worse. One way, you've got to wonder why they're still in work. The alternative is that it was all part of some bigger, nastier scam, which transferred huge amounts of wealth from taxpayers back to the very banks that created the crisis.

They shouldn't just be out of work, quite possibly, Geithner or Bernanke (or both) should be in the clink. We learned long ago that this President can cut bait when he thinks it's called for. Candidate, then president Obama has broken with his preacher, his green jobs guru, his social secretary. The last, Desiree Rogers, apparently got the boot for letting gatecrashers into last fall's first State Dinner.

If she can get the boot for letting strangers into a feast, surely Bernanke and Geithner should get at least that for covering up for the banks who ate up our whole economy? Or does Obama only get tough with homies?

The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter.com.

To kick off our new format, the always-astute Max Blumenthal, author of Republican Gomorrah, joins Laura in studio to talk about recent news: the Obama administration's spat with Israel over settlements, the recent California Republican party convention, and the new "coffee party" movement.

A spate of profiles of Timothy Geithner hit the news recently, from Vogue to the Atlantic and several places in between. Most of them seem to sound an optimistic note on the Treasury Secretary and former chief of the New York Federal Reserve, but we ask a couple of experts what's really going on with the economy--and if Geithner deserves any of that praise.

Robert Johnson is the director of economic policy at the Roosevelt Institute and the former chief economist for the Senate Banking Committee. Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America. They both have some words for the Democrats on what happens if don't wise up.

Nahr al-Bared ("Cold River") refugee camp in Lebanon is home to 20,000 displaced Palestinians, struggling to rebuild their home after its destruction in 2007. The camp has been around for some 60 years, and in this excerpt from "Checkpoints and More" by A Films, residents of the camp tell their stories.

Finally, Laura reminds us that while some profiles of Geithner may be cheering the former New York Fed chair, he's also implicated in the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

Baker is Co-Director of the Center for Economic And Policy Research, blogger at Beat the Press, and author of a new book, False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy.

Wessler joins us in studio, along with Irasema Garza, president of Legal Momentum, Wanda Fossett with Community Voices Heard, and via Skype, Carmen Cordero, welfare rights activist with the Hartford-based group Vecinos Unidos. They discuss food stamps, poverty, and why this might be the best opportunity we have to rebuild the social safety net.

Dean Baker of the Center for Economic And Policy Research, Beat the Press, and author of a new book, False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy, has some words for Democrats and Republicans alike who want to focus on "fiscal responsibility" while millions of Americans still struggle for jobs: they're heading "180 degrees the wrong way."

From our friends at Tactical Technology Collective, this second video in the series shows how ordinary citizens from around the world used basic video technology to record events and corrupt actions and effect change.

Imran Malik has just returned from a trip to Haiti providing medical aid--he went to medical school in Pakistan and got his first experience with emergency relief during the earthquake there in 2005. He also plays drums in Pakistani-American punk band The Kominas, who were featured in Taqwacore, a documentary on Muslim punk bands. He joins Laura in studio to talk about punk rock, Haiti, Muslim identity, and the problems with the U.S. health care system.

Sarah Posner, Associate Editor at Religion Dispatches and author of God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, gives us her thoughts on the Conservative Political Action Conference, the tea party movement, and where the anti-abortion movement fits in.

Two Greenpeace activists in Tokyo, Japan, are standing trial for exposing a corruption scandal in the whaling industry but the United Nations Human Rights Council and many other activists, including Amnesty International, have expressed concern for the way they have been treated. Watch the video and take action!

Finally, Laura has some words about Joseph Stack, the anti-government conservative who last week flew a plane into an IRS office in Austin, Texas.

"What's good for the goose is good for the gander." That's been the general operating principle of our government for the past few decades when it comes to the economy: help those at the top and the rest will follow.

As statistics from the Social Security Administration revealed again recently it's flat out wrong.

After years of tax cuts and salary hikes for people at the top, and a wage freeze or roll back at the bottom, corporate executives and top employees now account for more than one-third of all salaries earned in the United States. According to Social Security Administration figures, top earners pulled in $2.1 trillion of the total $6.4 trillion paid in 2007.

To state that again: of the pool of salary money that's paid out in this country -- a third of it goes to just the very top earners. (And that's just salary. The numbers don't include several types of stock options and other benefits.)

Allowing some to become super rich is supposed to benefit the rest, right? Wrong. As only earnings up to a certain ceiling are subject to payroll taxes, the disproportionate rise of pay for above-the-ceiling earners as a proportion of all wages is having a grim effect on Social Security. With more and more of that salary pool untaxed, less money is available to fund retirement benefits for all American workers.

There is a solution -- the Social Security Administration estimates that removing the earnings ceiling could eliminate the trust fund's deficit altogether for the next 75 years or nearly eliminate it entirely if all taxable earnings (including investment income) were subject to payroll tax. But that would require a major rethink of our philosophy.

It all reminds me of those signs at the G20 protests in London this spring. The Economic System isn't in Crisis -- the Economic System is CRISIS. Or to put it another way: believing that what's good for the goose is inevitably good for the gander is cooking all our geese. Or something like that.

The point is, do we really want to stimulate this economy or come up with something better?

The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, and online at GRITtv.organd TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GritLaura on Twitter.com. 

Damon Hewitt, Assistant Council NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Chris Keeley Associate Director of Common Cause, NY, David Dix, National Green Director League of Young Voters, and Juhu Thukral, Director of Law and Advocacy at the Opportunity Agenda on how the stimulus money’s being spent.