Today in our nation's capital, President Obama helped unveil a new statue dedicated to civil rights icon Rosa Parks. Civil rights leaders like Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the fight to ensure African Americans in our nation were no longer denied the right to vote.

The sequester deadline is March 1st, and there's only four days until Republican austerity measures start to kick in. President Obama released new reports Sunday, which detail how spending cuts will harm each state, and he continues to call on Congress to find a way to avoid the sequester. The Republicans were hard at work too.

Extreme wealth inequality. And according to a new paper from Thomas Hungerford at the Congressional Research Service, capital gains and dividend tax loopholes are responsible for our nation's unequal income divide. Capital gains and investments used to be taxed like regular income, but they were lowered once in 1996, and again by the Bush tax cuts.

Today, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles will put out a new deficit-reduction plan. The pair served on President Obama's fiscal commission in 2010, and presented a plan to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff – a plan that was so focused on austerity, that 350 economists co-wrote and published a letter rejecting it. And Simpson-Bowles are at it again.