It's Time to Get Angry

The collusion between Wall Street and Washington has never been greater. When members of the Senate's top investigative subcommittee grilled Goldman Sachs traders and executives about betting against their own shareholders, there was a bleak irony to the proceedings: almost every one of the ten senators doing the interrogating had built their political campaigns on millions of dollars from Goldman Sachs and its PAC. That's just one example of the way money has been welcomed into Washington. Lobbyists routinely write policy, while Wall Street titans are appointed to oversee their former employers. The influence of money and lobbyists has an equally strong stranglehold on both parties: The Bush administration made almost daily sport of bringing in special interest figures to regulate their own industries, but the list of Wall-Street-to-Washington career trajectories has grown even longer under Obama. Often, those making the most noise about fiscal discipline are working the hardest to undermine it. Despite their rhetoric about spending and entitlements, Republican lawmakers rarely see an upper-bracket tax break or an industry subsidy they won't support.

America's largest banks and corporations pay almost no taxes, and the wealthiest Americans pay less than you do. Last year, billionaire Warren Buffet was outraged to find out his secretary, who makes $60,000 a year, was taxed at almost twice the rate he was. Buffet was taxed at a 17.7 percent rate, but for the country's biggest banks and corporations that rate was closer to zero. Some of these institutions are only in business today because they were bailed out by American taxpayers. They make their profits using American infrastructure under the protection of American laws, all of which are paid for by the people. But they shuffle their money to foreign tax havens to avoid paying their dues, and they're getting better at it: for all their talk about being soaked by President Obama, corporate tax receipts have fallen precipitously since the middle of the 20th century. Their profit margins, and the salary of the average hedge fund manager or Wall Street CEO are so large that average people have a hard time even comprehending them. But let it sink in for a moment: If just one major bank paid its taxes—or a handful of hedge fund managers—thousands of jobs could be saved for American teachers, policemen, firefighters, and other public workers.

Let there be no mistake: the small circle of America's wealthiest and most powerful fear a country where they are prevented from using the system to enrich themselves, a country where they are held to the same standard as the masses of whom they privately speak so derisively. They, and their enablers in Washington, draw on a long tradition in conservative political theory that places, as Jonathan Chait wrote, "an almost mystical faith in the centrality and virtue of the upper class." Wall Street's knowing crooks bet on the American people being too powerless, demoralized, and uninformed to demand justice. America's opinion columnists quietly enable the status quo by insisting no one get too serious about what's going on in Washington or Lower Manhattan.

It's time to show them what anger looks like.