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The Greeks Get It
Here’s to the Greeks. They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. They know what to do when Goldman Sachs and international bankers collude with their power elite to falsify economic data and then make billions betting that the Greek economy will collapse. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare—the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it. ...

...What is happening in Greece, what will happen in Spain and Portugal, what is starting to happen here in states such as California, is the work of a global, white-collar criminal class. No government, including our own, will defy them. It is up to us. Barack Obama is simply the latest face that masks the corporate state. His administration serves corporate interests, not ours. Obama, like Goldman Sachs or Citibank, does not want the public to see how the Federal Reserve Bank acts as a private account and ATM machine for Wall Street at our expense. He, too, has helped orchestrate the largest transference of wealth upward in American history. He serves our imperial wars, refuses to restore civil liberties, and has not tamed our crippling deficits. His administration gutted regulatory agencies that permitted BP to turn the Gulf of Mexico into a toxic swamp. The refusal of Obama to intervene in a meaningful way to save the gulf’s ecosystem and curtail the abuses of the natural gas and oil corporations is not an accident. He knows where power lies. BP and its employees handed more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with the largest chunk of their money going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. ...

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Any Given Sunday
Last September, I was at some off-the-record Washington dinner and happened to be at the table of a Democratic Congressman. He'd just gotten back from recess in his district, where he'd been subjected to the full Tea Party treatment. As he described the rage he'd witnessed, it was clear he was spooked. I remember thinking he was more scared of voting for the healthcare bill than he was of voting against it, and that was going to be a problem.

I thought about that Congressman this past Sunday as I watched more than 700 protesters from National People's Action gather on the front lawn at the home of Gregory Baer, deputy counsel for the Bank Regulatory and Public Policy Group at Bank of America. NPA was coming from the other end of the spectrum from the Tea Party, and was there to demand a meeting with Baer's boss, the bank's CEO, Brian Moynihan. They were black and brown and white, senior citizens and little kids sitting on shoulders and lots of teenagers. They had bullhorns and signs and chanted "Bank of America! Bad for America!" (which, I promise, sounds better as a chant than it reads on the page). To hush the crowd, organizers would raise their clenched fists, and instantly it would fall silent. This was disciplined bedlam: like some crazy hybrid of a hip-hop show and a picket line....

...It's about damn time. We have witnessed the greatest implosion of American capitalism in nearly a century, and the only grassroots movement the cataclysm seems to have birthed is a right-wing populist backlash. When the country suffered a trauma that massively discredited the establishment rulers, the Democratic Party became the establishment. And progressive groups in DC, under stern White House orders not to cause trouble (don't show up at his door! he's a donor! we might nominate him for something!), descended into what one organizer calls "grotesque transactionalism."

"Showdown in America" is a rebuke to that tactic. Choosing direct action does not mean abandoning legislative mobilization, but it articulates a broader vision than just support for this or that amendment. "Now is not a time for tinkering," said NPA's executive director, George Goehl, at the organization's conference earlier that day. "We're not here to eke out a few victories along the margins. To make suffering a little less worse for people.... The brutal facts are that we cannot begin to build an economy for all of us when we have a democracy that works only for corporations and members of Congress."

If we're going to get reform on the scale we need, bank lobbyists and members of Congress alike have to be confronted with the terrifying thought that the system from which they profit might just be run over—that 700 angry protesters might show up on their lawn any given Sunday.