Remember When Senate Conservatives Tanked Cramdown Legislation?

On Thursday, April 29, 2009, the Senate defeated, 45-51, Brad Miller's Cramdown legislation, which had already passed the House (234-191), dooming the country to the financial and economic catastrophe we're suffering through now. Not a single Republican voted for it-- and 11 conservative Democrats crossed the aisle to vote with the GOP, including three who are up for reelection next year: Ben Nelson (NE), Jon Tester (MT), and Tom Carper (DE). Just thought I'd mention it. I'll also mention that almost all two dozen Democrats in the House who voted with the GOP on this were subsequently defeated for reelection, although Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT), Ron Kind (WI), Larry Kissell (NC), and Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK) managed to survive... so far.

Saturday AlterNet made the best attempt to date to get out the real story of OccupyTheBoardroom, reprinting 9 Angry, Heart-Breaking Messages to Wall Street's Elites From the 99%. Joshua Holland's compendium begins with a photograph of half a dozen well-heeled securities traders sipping champagne on a balcony high over Zuccotti Park as they look down on the Occupation below, "capturing," he writes, "the haughty detachment with which Big Finance has received this rapidly spreading expression of popular outrage."

Charlotte, North Carolina is the second largest banking center in the United States after NYC, home to Bank of America and East Coast headquarters for Wells Fargo. It was also the home of Wachovia before they went belly up in 2008. One of the most poignant letters AlterNet published, "My Father's Hands," was written by a woman in North Carolina named Liza.

Like you I’m from the Tar Heel state so I thought I’d tell you my story. A couple of years ago my father died waiting for a liver transplant. It was an ugly, horrible death and left me parentless while still in my 20s. My brother and I inherited the small ranch-style house my father worked his whole life to pay off. (Our mother died during our childhoods.) I wanted to take care of my father’s money so I invested it. Six months later I had lost over half of it when the crash happened. I lost half of my father’s life savings because of the corrupt practices of Wall Street. My father worked his whole life. He was the 11th child of a sharecropping family and was sent to the cotton fields before he was ten. He completed high school but there was no money for college so he went to work at blue-collar jobs which he used to support us his whole life. 

When I think of the money I lost, I think of my father’s hands. I think of his broken, scarred hands that built a home and future for me. It wasn’t just money that Wall Street stole. Futures, trust, hard work and respect-- those are the things Wall Street corruption has stolen from the American People, not just money. I don’t think everyone on Wall Street is corrupt, but the system is, and I want to do my part to correct it, even if it’s just writing a letter like this. I owe my father that. Mr. Bowles, I hope you do your part too. Because of your position, you are a powerful person in our society. So I ask you, how will you use your power? What will your legacy be?

Brad Miller is North Carolina's best Member of Congress. Respected on both sides of the aisle, his gentlemanly demeanor makes his relentless battle on behalf of ordinary American families seem more palatable to his more conservative colleagues. A senior member of the House Financial Services Committee, it is Brad who leads the charge on half of consumers, small businesses and those the banksters see as prey. Brad is one of only 3 House incumbents endorsed by Blue America this year. He was a guest at Crooks and Liars earlier this month and you can read the Cliff Notes version here. Yesterday Brad sent me an interview he had done with Alex Ulam at The Nation, Why a Mortgage Cramdown Bill Is Still the Best Bet to Save the Economy.

Ulam isn't of the school that puts the whole blame for our financial mess on George Bush and the Republican policies Congress was able to enact before 2008. "Much of the blame for the country’s current economic woes," he wrote, "lies with the Obama administration’s failure to forcefully tackle the biggest threat to the American economy today: the housing crisis." The power of the Wall Street (and Charlotte) banksters over Washington is prohibitive, or, as Congressman puts it, "There seems to be an unstated but perhaps conscious policy of not forcing them [banks] to recognize losses. And almost everything that we can do to help the balance sheet problems for households-- to help reduce household debt-- would require the banks to recognize losses.”

When Senator Barack Obama was running for president he told voters that he would support legislation to allow homeowners to get relief in bankruptcy court. The legislation would have repealed a bankruptcy provision that prohibits modifications of mortgages on a primary residence. “I will change our bankruptcy laws to make it easier for families to stay in their homes,” he told voters at a campaign rally in September 2008, describing the bankruptcy exemption for mortgages as “the kind of out-of-touch Washington loophole that makes no sense.”

Today cram-downs make even more sense than they did in 2009. The various bank proprietary loan modification programs and the government-sponsored loan modification programs are widely acknowledged to be failures for not helping enough homeowners and also for having high re-default rates. But one of the biggest unmitigated disasters about these programs is that homeowners who have succeeded in obtaining loan modifications actually have become mired in more debt. That is because instead of reducing homeowners overall debt, these loan modification programs have focused on lowering monthly payments on a homeowner’s primary mortgage by reducing interest rates and extending the term of the loan. In 2010, nearly 95 percent of active, permanent loan modifications resulted in homeowners’ actually owing more debt on their homes than before the modification according to a Congressional Oversight Panel report.

The reason that we don’t have cram-downs is that the banks lobbied heavily against the 2009 bill. They said it would further destabilize home prices and that they would have to raise interest rates to account for the risk of underwater homeowners’ having their mortgages modified in a bankruptcy. They also argued that bankruptcy reform would create a “moral hazard” by rewarding irresponsible borrowers who took out mortgages that they couldn’t afford.

The misleading message on cram-downs that stuck in the minds of many voters came from CNBC host Rick Santelli. It was Santelli’s 2009 rant about cram-downs that launched the Tea Party. “This is America!” Santelli told cheering traders on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?”

In contrast to candidate Obama, President Obama was conspicuously silent on cram-downs. According to ProPublica, Treasury Department staffers actually cautioned lawmakers against the bankruptcy reform legislation. Unfortunately for underwater homeowners, although the cramdown legislation passed Congress in March 2009, it was defeated the following month in the Senate by a vote of 45 to 51. Georgetown Law School professor Adam Levitin, who has written extensively on cram-down legislation, says that Obama’s lack of support doomed the bill. “Had Obama put his weight into it, it would have passed,” says Levitin, “It would have been a fight, but he was too chicken to have the fight.”

“The principal objective of the Obama administration and the Bush administration before that was to let the banks avoid taking immediate losses,” says Democratic Representative Brad Miller of North Carolina, who sponsored the cram-down bill, “The bankruptcy law change was incompatible with that, it would have required the banks to recognize a lot of losses immediately and might very well have revealed some of them to be very nearly insolvent or actually insolvent.”

...Aside from propping up the country’s largest banks, there’s very little reason not to pass bankruptcy reform. In contrast to the Obama administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program, under which the taxpayer is partially footing the bill, court ordered mortgage cram-downs would cost the federal government nothing. Indeed, cram-down legislation requires no government bailouts or financial incentives for lenders or for borrowers. The 2009 CBO cost estimate of the proposed cram-down legislation shows that the federal government actually would have made money on the bill through the increase in bankruptcy filing fees.

...The argument that cram-downs would have rewarded irresponsible borrowers is also misleading. Chapter 13 Bankruptcy is not a get-out-of-debt-free option. It requires borrowers to live on a court-monitored budget for three to five years. Further, in many parts of the country, there are Americans who owe more than twice as much on their mortgages as their homes are worth. Many of these people are victims of predatory lending and appraisal fraud. The most authoritative official report that we have on the events that led to the 2007 meltdown, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s final report cites widespread instances of predatory lending during the housing bubble. For example, the commission’s report discusses how the quality assurance department of New Century, once the nation’s second-largest subprime lender, found evidence of predatory lending, legal and state violations and credit issues in 25 percent of the mortgages that they audited. Yet instead of reforming the company’s business practices, New Century executives dissolved their quality assurance department and terminated its personnel.

In addition to potentially helping millions of Americans get back on track, bankruptcy reform actually would have benefited the entities that own most of the outstanding secured mortgage debt in this country-- Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, pension funds and private investors. “Investors recognize that a 20 or 30 percent principal write down creates re-performance,” says Joshua Rosner, managing director at Graham Fisher & Co, a company that advises investors, “and it beats absolutely a 70 percent plus loss in a default.”

Even one of the major unstated reasons for not passing the bankruptcy reform bill, protecting the nation’s largest banks, no longer holds water. Failure to pass the cram-down legislation has not in fact saved the banks from their travails. Bank of America, the nation’s largest bank, is going wobbly due in large part to its continuing problems with mortgage meltdown. If the cram-down legislation had passed and BoA had failed as a result, then so be it. Millions of Americans facing foreclosure would have had a much better shot at saving their homes, and that would have been a much bigger boon to the overall economy than bailing out the banks.

Congressman Miller participated in the early planning stages of OccupyRaleigh. You'd expect that from someone who told us that "the Obama Administration faced a choice between helping homeowners who could afford a mortgage on their home, but not the one they had, and helping the biggest banks pretend to be solvent until they could earn their way back in the game. The two were incompatible: an effective response to the foreclosure crisis would require the banks to recognize losses on their mortgage assets, especially second liens at the biggest banks. I think we took the wrong road, and that has made all the difference."

And when asked about Obama's strange statement last month that there were no laws broken and no crimes committed by the banksters, Brad didn't hesitate to politely disagree with the President:

The allegations in civil lawsuits by private mortgage investors and insurance companies, if true, appears pretty clearly to be of criminal conduct. I've struggled with the issue of politics and criminal prosecutions. I think calls for "perp walks" can sound like an appeal to mob rule, but not prosecuting powerful people in the face of clear evidence of criminal conduct is a real problem for democracy. I think some may have discouraged prosecutions because they feared for our fragile banking system, but I fear for our fragile democracy if people believe that the powerful are immune. I think the lack of criminal prosecutions or even aggressive civil lawsuits has offended the sense of justice of many Americans, including me.

If you'd like to help Brad stay in Congress, you can do that here at a special Blue America page dedicated to incumbents worth holding onto. The GOP-controlled North Carolina legislature gerrymandered his district to try to make sure the banksters would have one less watchdog to contend with. Brad intends to thwart their plans.

Throw A Pie In The Face Of The Chairman of The Board Today

What a day! We've been working with a coalition of online groups for 2 weeks and finally launched OccupyTheBoardRoom early this morning, after tweaking final details all last night. And then we did our live chat session with Colorado activist Joe Miklosi, who's running for the congressional seat currently held by right-wing extremist Mike Coffman. And in the middle of all that a very old pal, Steve Barton, sent me the song above, "Pie In The Face," from his Projector album.

Like the Occupy Wall Street movement, Steve's a non-violent kind of guy. No one's really advocating physical pies in anyone's faces-- not even any of the 1%-- just metaphorical pies in the face in the form of e-mails. You can send one here and you can view the ones others have sent today here. I know Steve about 30 years. He was one of the singers Translator, a band on my indie label, 415. He's one of the 99%. I hope he's read The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robins. I hope you have too. It goes a long way towards explaining why-- unlike us-- the reactionaries are decidedly not non-violent. They're uptight, viciously so and, as we saw today, they and their brutal agents are looking for a fight, for an excuse to put the 99% back in "our place." As Robin explains, there's nothing that infuriates the 1% afflicted with reactionary mind syndrome than when the rest of us try to claim equality.

During the Seattle general strike of 1919, workers went to great lengths to provide basic government services, including law and order. So successful were they that the mayor [a fascist] concluded it was this, the workers' independent capacity to limit violence and anarchy, that posed the greatest threat.

"The so-called sympathetic Seattle strike was an attempted revolution. That there was no violence does not alter the fact... True, there were no flashing guns, no bombs, no killings. Revolution, I repeat, doesn't need violence. The general strike, as practiced in Seattle, is of itself the weapon of revolution, all the more dangerous because quiet... That is to say, it puts the government out of operation. And that is all there is to revolt-- no matter how achieved"

...Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, agency, the prerogative of the elite.

Though it is often claimed that the left stands for equality while the right stands for freedom, this notion misstates the actual disagreement between right and left. Historically, the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders. What the conservative sees and dislikes in equality, in other words, is not a threat to freedom, but its extension. For in that extension, he sees a loss of his own freedom. ... Such was the threat Edmund Burke saw in the French Revolution: not merely an expropriation of property or explosion of violence but an inversion of the obligations of deference and command. "The levellers," he claimed, "only change and pervert the natural order of things."

The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person-- to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule.

There's an Edmund Burke Institute for American Renewal in Washington, a block up from K Street and they just love Paul Ryan, the Wall Street shill who presented plutocracy's plan for ending Medicare and gutting Social Security. Ryan has never worked an honest day in his miserable life but he's well-paid by his Wall Street overlords and he's now-- though a career politician-- a member of the 1%. If you're a Burke devotee, I'm sure Ryan is your kind of politician. For the 99%... there's Rob Zerban-- who spent this afternoon tweeting up a storm from OccupyMilwaukee.

Occupy The Board Room... Today-- E-Mail A Bankster

This morning Blue America sent out the following letter to all our members. (If you're not already a member, all you have to do is to contribute anything-- even $1-- to any Blue America candidate. Then you'll get our e-mails directly... like this one urging everyone to take part in a really cool mass action today-- mass and at the same time profoundly personal:

105 US cities occupied. 1499 MeetUps around the world. 50,000 people in the streets of New York and tens of thousands more in cities across the country. Wall Street occupied continuously for one month.
 
The Occupy Wall Street has struck a deep chord with ordinary people around the world and changed our idea of what we, the people, can accomplish by doing one simple thing: bearing witness on the very doorstep of those responsible for the global economic crisis.
 
Today is the biggest action yet-- the #OccupyWallStreet Global Day of Action. Today the 99% are joining together to stand up to Wall Street and the 1% who control it. In a world where the 1% prospers obscenely while the rest of us fall behind, we are demanding accountability for their crimes and telling them exactly how their actions have affected our lives.
 
Click here to OccupyTheBoardRoom and join in the Global Day of Action online.
 
Despite our growing strength, the Wall Street CEO’s and their cronies who crashed our economy still act like they can ignore us. So we're aiming our voices directly at the people who caused this global crisis by filling up their inboxes with stories of how their recklessness affected our lives.  
 
Last year (2009), Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase, received $17.5 million in pay-- not bad, especially considering that his company took $100.7 billion in taxpayer bailouts and that since then JPMorganChase has made a profit of $29.1 billion (2009-'10). Since 2009, JPMorganChase has spent tens of millions of dollars in lobbying Congress and in campaign "contributions." At the same time Chase has foreclosed on thousands of families ($74 billion worth of foreclosed homes). Millions at the top, homeless shelters at the bottom. That’s how the 1% plays the game.
 
Click here to Occupy the Boardroom by sharing your 99%er story with the executives at Chase.
 
But OccupyWallStreet has allowed us to stand up and point out, loudly and powerfully, how the greed of the 1% has trumped the need of the 99%. So while hundreds of thousands of people around the world take action in the streets, we are joining in by virtually Occupying the Board Rooms and filling up the inboxes of the 1% with the stories of the 99%.
 
Click here to deliver your truth to the inbox of the Executives at Chase.
 
This is our moment. Seize it.

If you missed it yesterday, The Gawker ran an invitation to call Vikram Pandit, CEO of Citigroup. I doubt the cell phone number is still functioning.

Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit told a Fortune conference on Wednesday that he "would be happy to talk to" Occupy Wall Street protesters "any time they want." That's so cool of him! Here's his cell phone number. He's waiting for your call.

Things you might want to ask Pandit: Can I borrow $3.4 billion at no interest if I put up a bunch of my worthless shit as collateral? I promise to pay it back, because I'm just going to lend it out to a bunch of idiots at like 9% interest and book profits. Or how about you just buy $27 billion of my worthless shit? No deal? How about you just guarantee to eat 90% of the losses on that worthless shit up to $300 billion?

Yesterday the Center for Constitutional Rights joined with hundreds of other organizations and civic leaders to commend OccupyWallStreet for their patriotic activism in the ugly face of a domestic fascist resurgence. Their statement:

The Center for Constitutional Rights stands in full support of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Your emerging movement represents the growing discontent with ever-increasing disparities among the rich and the poor, and it is an inspiring step towards a true and organic people’s movement demanding the social and economic rights that have long been denied to the majority of this nation. OWS shows the power of dissent, a power and a right that law enforcement has long sought to criminalize and repress.

The Center for Constitutional Rights condemns the brutal and aggressive policing tactics employed by the NYPD and we call on them to cease targeting the OWS participants. Both Brookfield Properties, the private company that owns the space, and the City of New York are obligated to respect the First Amendment rights of the protesters and allow them to stay, free of provocation and violence from the police.

OWS is providing the opportunity for thousands of people with a shared purpose to come together and create a platform for all of the voices seeking sustained and far-reaching economic justice. We support the many conversations taking place at Liberty Plaza and we value the experience of a community building itself, learning to give voice to all participants, and working out issues of race, gender, safe spaces and more. At the same time, you are calling out economic injustice and promoting human rights, no small feat. 

The Center for Constitutional Rights recognizes that the grassroots, leaderless, horizontally-organized nature of OWS is one of its greatest strengths. We embrace you.

And you can check out the results of the OccupytheBoardroom here. Did you send your e-mail in yet?

A Real Tear Jerker This One

Occupy Los Angeles - The Beginning Is Near from Marta Evry on Vimeo.

My friend Marta made this inspiring video at the OccupyLA encampment at City Hall here in Los Angeles. I like!

Everybody was talking about this Krugman post today-- I Am Not Your Mirror Image about Keynesianism. But I'm going to spare you the details beyond the link above and the groovy video below. Instead, let's look at the less complicated and wonky Krugman post that no one is talking about but my friend Harry, Hard Times On Wall Street. Get out your hankies:

An era of decline and disappointment for bankers may not end for years, according to interviews with more than two dozen executives and investors. Blaming government interference and persecution, they say there isn’t enough global stability, leverage or risk appetite to triumph in the current slump.
…
Options Group’s Karp said he met last month over tea at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York with a trader who made $500,000 last year at one of the six largest U.S. banks.

The trader, a 27-year-old Ivy League graduate, complained that he has worked harder this year and will be paid less. The headhunter told him to stay put and collect his bonus.

“This is very demoralizing to people,” Karp said. “Especially young guys who have gone to college and wanted to come onto the Street, having dreams of becoming millionaires.”

Piss you off? Good. Get ready for OccupyTheBoardRoom this Saturday... details soon.

Get Ready For Some Awesome Rumblin' From The 99%... This Weekend

This is just a heads up-- I'm allowed to give a heads-up-- about some important action for American patriots this weekend targeting, peacefully, of course, banksters-- related to the march on the homes of NYC plutocrats. You can count on some details here at DWT later this week... gotta wait for the 99% to give the final finger wiggle, but think "OccupyTheBoardRoom." And remember, we're an unprecedented coalition of labor, community, and netroots groups coming together to voice our legitimate anger at the 1%. And, oh, boy, are we gonna have some fun with the plutocrats! I call dibs on fascist greedball Paul Singer, although I expect many people will... for obvious reasons. Intrepid reporter Lee Fang explains:

The campaign the marginalize and destroy the growing 99 Percent Movement is in full swing, with many in the media attempting to smear the people participating in the “occupation” protests across the country. However, several of the so-called journalists deriding, and in some cases sabotaging the movement, have paychecks thanks to a billionaire whose business practices have been scorned as among the worst of the financial elite.

As the New York Times has documented, Paul Singer, a Republican activist and hedge fund manager worth over $900 million, has emerged as one of the most important power brokers within the GOP. Now, it appears that the reporters financed by Singer are at the forefront of efforts to tarnish the reputation of 99 Percent Movement demonstrators.

...As Singer-funded journalists make their best effort to diminish the Occupy Wall Street protesters as confused idiots unable to articulate a clear goal, it so happens that these journalists are funded by a man who epitomizes the crony capitalist behavior of the greedy one percent.

Singer, manager of a $17 billion hedge fund, earned the moniker “vulture capitalist” for buying the debt of Third World countries for pennies on the dollar, then using his political and legal connections to extract massive judgements to force collection-- even from nations suffering from starvation and violent conflicts. Singer and his partners have used such tactics in Panama, Ecuador, Poland, Cote d’Ivoire, Turkmenistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In addition to squeezing impoverished countries with sovereign debt schemes, Singer speculates in the oil markets, a practice which can lead to gasoline price hikes here in the United States. The revelation that Singer engages in oil speculation, and also funds Republican lawmakers opposed to oil speculation regulations, was exposed by ThinkProgress using leaked government documents.

Singer’s political philanthropy is tied to his business interests. As Greg Palast has reported, Singer purchased near-bankrupt asbestos companies before his allies in Congress changed an asbestoas-liability law to make his investment incredibly profitable (at the expense, critics allege, of sickened workers). More recently, Singer has forged close financial ties to Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ), a little-known lawmaker at the forefront of efforts to repeal Dodd-Frank financial regulations on hedge funds like Elliott Associates, Singer’s firm.

The rise of Singer’s political profile can be traced to his work as a top donor to pro-Bush character-assasination groups like the “Swift Boat Veterans.” In recent years, he has quietly worked with the right-wing billionaire industrialist Koch brothers and Republican strategist Karl Rove to finance a fleet of anti-Obama organizations, including the shady attack ad nonprofit, “Crossroads GPS.” Singer also led a controversial group of Republican moneymen in a bid to recruit Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) into the presidential race, but shifted to endorsing Mitt Romney. Singer and Romney are already close; Singer’s hedge fund actually manages at least $1 million of the former governor’s personal investments.

Singer’s influence even extends to the Supreme Court. As ThinkProgress reported, Singer hosted Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to speak at his $5,000-$25,000 a plate dinners.

Just substitute Singer for Koch here, although the two plutocratic wings of the GOP are in a death match right now:


In a much-discussed column this past Sunday, Panic of the Plutocrats, Paul Krugman points out that the OccupyWallStreet movement has "elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent. And this reaction tells you something important-- namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called 'economic royalists,' not the people camping in Zuccotti Park."

Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police-- confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction-- but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.

Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.

Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.

And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”

The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.

Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry barons went wild over very mild criticism from President Obama. They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in risky speculation. And as for their reaction to proposals to close a loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes-- well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

And then there’s the campaign of character assassination against Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer now running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Not long ago a YouTube video of Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth case for taxes on the rich went viral. Nothing about what she said was radical-- it was no more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”

But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy, you’d think that Ms. Warren was the second coming of Leon Trotsky. George Will declared that she has a “collectivist agenda,” that she believes that “individualism is a chimera.” And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.”

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny-- and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.

So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.

I'd like to point you-- again-- to the interview we did with North Carolina Congressman Brad Miller Saturday (highlights here) and remind you once again of his response to the question about Obama claiming that the Wall Street banksters committed no crimes, just bent some loopholes, a horrible distortion of what actually happened-- as Rep. Miller explained:

The allegations in civil lawsuits by private mortgage investors and insurance companies, if true, appears pretty clearly to be of criminal conduct. I've struggled with the issue of politics and criminal prosecutions. I think calls for "perp walks" can sound like an appeal to mob rule, but not prosecuting powerful people in the face of clear evidence of criminal conduct is a real problem for democracy. I think some may have discouraged prosecutions because they feared for our fragile banking system, but I fear for our fragile democracy if people believe that the powerful are immune. I think the lack of criminal prosecutions or even aggressive civil lawsuits has offended the sense of justice of many Americans, including me. [emphasis is from DWT]

I got an e-mail from netroots hero Alan Grayson yesterday asking where's my $50,000. "The Government Accountability Office (GAO)," he wrote, "says that our Government has handed out $16 trillion to the banks. Let me repeat that, in case you didn’t hear me the first time. The GAO says that our Government HAS HANDED OUT $16 TRILLION TO THE BANKS."

That little gem appears on Page 131 of GAO Report No. GAO-11-696. A report issued two months ago. A report that somehow seems to have eluded the attention of virtually every network, every major newspaper, and every news show.

How much is $16 trillion? That is an amount equal to more than $50,000 for every man, woman and child in America. That’s more than every penny that every American earns in a year. That’s an amount equal to almost a third of our national net worth -- the value of every home, car, personal belonging, business, bank account, stock, bond, piece of land, book, tree, chandelier, and everything else anyone owns in America. That’s an amount greater than our entire national debt, accumulated over the course of two centuries.

A $16 trillion stack of dollar bills would reach all the way to the Moon. And back. Twice.

That’s enough to pay for Saturday mail delivery. For the next 5,000 years.

All of that money went from you and me to the banks. And we got nothing. Not even a toaster.

I have been patiently waiting to see whether this disclosure would provoke some kind of reaction. Answer: nope. Everyone seems much more interested in discussing whether or not they like the cut of Perry’s jib.

Whatever a jib may be... The Government gave $16 trillion to the banks. And nobody else is talking about it.

Think about it. Think about what that means.

That's exactly, despite what Paul Singer's and the Kochs' p.r. agents are driving home with the corporate media, what the OccupyWallStreet Movement is talking about. Even Obama's #1 puppet in the Senate, Dick Durbin (D-IL) is now talking about it. He wants me to send an angry message to Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan by clicking on a link.

It's just outrageous. Last week, Bank of America announced it will start charging its customers $5 a month just to access their own money with a debit card.

If you're a Bank of America customer who doesn't appreciate being gouged with excessive fees, you should show Bank of America what a competitive marketplace looks like and find a bank or credit union that values their customers.

We can't let B of A get away with this-- and we've got to speak out, loud and clear, to show other banks that it is unacceptable to pad already excessive profits on the backs of hard-working Americans.

I see this ending up one of two ways:

Outcome #1: Bank of America gets an earful from so many customers and potential customers-- like you-- that it decides against making monthly fees the new "normal" for American debit card users.

OR

Outcome #2: Too few folks notice and speak up about the new fees, sending a message to other big banks that they can charge this monthly fee to their debit card customers, too.

Outcome #2 is completely unacceptable-- but I need you to speak out to make sure it doesn't happen.

In 2007, we sent thousands of emails to convince BP's CEO to give up his company's plan to dump more toxic chemicals into Lake Michigan. The DickDurbin.com community has proven that we can take on some of the biggest special interests around.

Now let's put that same kind of pressure on Bank of America's CEO to make sure he knows these new debit card fees are simply unacceptable-- and to make sure every single bank gets the message.

I sent Brian Moynihan the best kind of message for him to understand when I closed my BofA accounts. And Saturday... well, stay tuned... www.occupytheboardroom.org is in countdown mode.