The G-20 summit is underway in London and world leaders are hoping the day will end with a new global deal for tackling the worldwide recession. It’s a moment that reminds our next guest of the end of the year 1930, when the world was 18 months into the Great Depression. Stocks were down about 60 percent, corporate profits had been cut in half, and unemployment had climbed from 4 percent to about 10 percent. Sounds familiar, right? To help us understand what tools world leaders and central bankers can use to the global economy out of a recession and whether a return to the gold standard can help that is Liaquat Ahamed, the Author of Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World.

Tax season has arrived. As we’ve seen with several of President Obama’s administration nominees, paying taxes honestly and correctly is not the easiest thing to do. Kansas Governor and Secretary of Health and Human Services nominee, Kathleen Sebelius, is the latest casualty. Do you pay your taxes honestly and correctly? Or is finding a tax loophole superseding baseball as the real national pastime? Mark Goulston, is a business psychologist and author of the book, Get Out of Your Own Way at Work … and Help Others Do the Same. He joins The Takeaway to help explain why it is just so hard to pay your taxes.

For more, read Sitara Nieves' Producer's Note on tax evasion, tax resistance and tax rebellion.

To help explain the tax basics, watch this video of a rapping Matthew Lesko.

Today, Vermont’s House of Representatives votes on a controversial bill that would legalize gay marriage in the state. The bill has come under fire from Vermont Governor Jim Douglas who has vowed to veto the legislation if it passes. Douglas's statements have drawn both praise and condemnation. The Takeaway talks to Ross Sneyd, news editor with Vermont Public Radio.

Portia de Rossi did a public service announcement on the gay marriage issue on Jimmy Kimmel Live!:

Former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens may walk away from seven felony convictions a free man with a clean record. Yesterday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department is seeking to have Stevens’ verdict thrown out due to prosecutorial misconduct. It will not pursue a new trial and wants all charges dropped. Stevens, the Senate’s longest serving Republican, was convicted in October for lying on financial disclosure forms about gifts. The Takeaway talks to Libby Casey, reporter for Alaska Public Radio Network in Washington, D.C. who has been following the case since last fall, and Steve Heimel, Host of “Talk of Alaska” in Anchorage, Alaska.

In the video below, Stevens' attorney Brendan Sullivan discusses the case.

Despite the President's assurances, it is not to hard to imagine that the end of the American auto industry seems near. GM reported this week a 45 percent drop in sales, Ford sales were down 41 percent and Chrysler echoed that sales drop. But China has begun taking a bold step toward what its automakers believe will be the future of cars—the hybrid. Long struggling to catch up with Japan and the U.S. in the gasoline-powered car market, China is now devoting its efforts to electric cars, which is a big step for a country not known for its environmental progressiveness. Keith Bradsher is reporting this story and he joins us now.

For more, read Keith Bradsher's article, China Vies to Be World’s Leader in Electric Carsin today's New York Times.

The President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, and his counterpart from Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, met in the Turkish capital Ankara yesterday. They agreed to increase military cooperation against Islamist extremists. It’s a significant step, because relations between Afghanistan and its neighbor Pakistan have been frosty after Afghanistan had accused Pakistan of not doing enough to prevent militants attacking from the Pakistani side of the border. The meeting came as the Commander of U.S. forces in the region, General David Petraeus, told a Senate hearing that the fight against the Taliban in Pakistan would continue because, as he put it, the Taliban pose a threat to Pakistan’s very existence. Rob Watson is the BBC’s Defense and Security correspondent, he joins us now.

One way to get your head around exactly what happened with the mortgage crisis is to look at the tools that made it happen. Michael Osinski started out with a job in data entry to support his sick wife. A decade later, he found himself on Wall Street writing the software that let traders turn plain old mortgages into bonds. You could say it’s thanks to him that we all know the arcane term turned dirty word: mortgage-backed security. Osinski joins The Takeaway this morning to talk about his role in the financial meltdown and his new life as an oyster farmer.

For more, read Michael Osinski's article, My Manhattan Project: How I helped build the bomb that blew up Wall Street in this week's New York Magazine.

See Osinki at his new job as an oyster farmer in the video below.

You know the names: Dr. Ross, Carol, Dr. Carter, Rocket Romano. You know the stars: George Clooney, Noah Wylie, Julianna Margulies, Maria Bello, William H. Macy. At its peak, ER attracted some 47 million viewers on any given Thursday and had its fans hooked on the heartache, heartburn and even massive heart attacks the show produced every week. After all these years Cook County General Hospital is still standing despite the helicopter crashes, bomb scares, blizzards, shootings, hostage scenarios, toxic spills, car accidents, explosions, emergency births, sudden deaths, and Haz Mat incidents. But tonight, after fifteen years on the air, Cook County closes its doors as ER flatlines. To help commemorate this occasion, we are joined by Angel Cohn, not only is she senior editor at Television Without Pity, but she has watched all fifteen seasons of the show.

Some of the most heart-stopping, breath-taking moments from the past seasons of ER:

Starting in 1882 and continuing for almost a century, the United State's Bird Migration Program collected two-by-five notecards from bird watchers around North America. Today, these long preserved cards — did we mention that there were over six million of them? — are being dusted off, in the hopes that they can tell us something about a bird of a different feather: climate change. Jessica Zelt, coordinator of the newly established North American Bird Phenology Program where she is in charge of digitizing the cards, joins the show to tell us more.

Are you itchin' to get your hands on a little American history? You can transcribe the migration notecards into the digital directory from your very own home. Click here to help! Go on, be a part of bird history.

For more, read Molly Webster's Producer's Note

And before we let you go, we'd like to leave you with a little bird quote from our friends here at the Internet, because really, what's the World Wide Web good for if not to root-out some profound, bird-related witticisms? Ahem: "My favorite weather is bird-chirping weather." ~Loire Hartwould

(c) USGS.gov

(c) USGS.gov

Leaders at the G-20 represent 85% of the global economy. And there are possibly as many financial rescue plans as there are world leaders at the summit. One option has Germany and France pushing the U.S. to accept global financial regulations that could reach well inside American borders. Helping us to make sense of what's happening at the G-20 today is The New York Times' Mark Landler who is in the Excel Center in London, where the meeting is taking place.

For more, read Mark Landler's and David Sanger's article, Global Leaders Meeting to Resolve Rift on Economic Plan, in today's New York Times.

Our friend David Sanger, Chief Washington Correspondent for the New York Times and author of The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power, is at the G-20 summit in London. He joins us with a road map of the leaders, the proposed options, the possible outcomes, and his own suggestion for the Presidential ipod.

For more, read his article with Mark Landler, Global Leaders Meeting to Resolve Rift on Economic Plan in today's New York Times.