If you're a progressive activist seeking to make economic change, delving into the role of "derivatives" or other arcane discussions likely results in blank stares. Which is why Erica Payne, founder of the Agenda Project says that progressives need to cut through the right-wing noise and talk about what's really happening to the U.S. economy. For Payne, explaining  the recession isn't complicated: "A bunch of rich privileged guys stole our money."

Payne, along with a star-studded panel of speakers including AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, National Domestic Workers Alliance Director Ai-Jen Poo, and Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, highlighted an economic keynote this weekend at the June 7-10 Netroots Nation conference in Providence, R.I. Moderated by Heather McGhee, director of the Washington office of policy think tank Demos, panelists discussed strategies for shifting the national conversation decisively away from austerity and toward job creation, while and the challenges facing ordinary Americans.

Panelists spent the first part of the discussion picking apart the "tightening the belt" metaphor frequently used by conservatives to justify austerity measures. Krugman bluntly laid out the flawed logic of likening national economics to household economics: "We are not an individual family. We are a society." If everyone cuts their spending at the same time, everyone suffers as a result, a concept known since the 1930s, argued Krugman.

Yet, conservatives continue to hammer home the austerity message, "as if markets are not controlled by people" who made conscious choices that led to the recession, people who can "make other choices," said Payne.

Trumka agreed and added: "The powers that be want us to believe that we can't do anything about [the recession]. That's nonsense. We need to force public debate on our territory."

Even if that means seizing the the public conversation in creative and provocative ways, argued Payne, pointing to a video created by Agenda Project showing a grandmother being pushed off a cliff to translate the real world implications of Rep. Paul Ryan's budget cuts for seniors. In an ongoing campaign, the "Patriotic Millionaires" travel the country to implore lawmakers to raise their taxes, effectively inserting the word "patriotic" into the discussion about taxes.

Panelists urged bloggers and activists to expose the dangerous choices conservatives have made to dismantle the middle class, and to spread the word on the positive choices we can make to "grow our way" out of the recession, as Krugman argued.

Looking to history for a solution, Trumka described how what were formerly low-paying, dangerous jobs in the coal and auto industries were transformed into good jobs through collective bargaining. So it's no surprise that conservatives are viciously attacking unions and systematically dismantling collective bargaining so that "the conditions that define excluded workers increasingly define all workers," said Poo. Progressives have a great opportunity to really change the discussion by looking at the changing nature of the job market.

With someone in the United States turning 65 years old every second, home care for the elderly is one of the most rapidly growing industries and will shape the landscape of the labor market in the coming years the way that manufacturing dominated the economy a few decades ago, Poo explained. By articulating what we want those care jobs to look like, we can "set the tone for the kind of economy we want in the 21st century."