class wars

"Something snapped in the world last week" Jim Kunstler declares this morning, "and a lot of people around the world sensed it -- especially in the organs of news and opinion -- but this ominous twang was not very clearly identified. It was, in fact, the sound of the financial becoming political. The macro-swindle of a worldwide Ponzi orgy now stands revealed and the vacuum left in its place is about to suck everything familiar into it -- standards-of-living, hopes, dreams, not to mention lives."

The emphasis is mine, and the point needs to be emphasized, as it was yesterday and again this morning in D.C.

As if acting on Kunstler's cue, crowds described by Reuters as "huge" and "raucous" gathered outside the Washington D.C. home of Bank of America's top lawyer Gregory Baer yesterday, demanding that B of A stop lobbying against the financial reform bill currently working its way through Congress. Led by the Chicago-based grassroots organization National People's Action, the mob reassembled this morning, augmented by members of the Service Employees International Union and "stormed a Bank of America branch near the U.S. Capitol on Monday, forcing the bank to close down as confused customers looked on and tellers retreated to an interior room."

In addition, "Other groups from SEIU and National People's Action were set to stage protests at BofA's and JPMorgan Chase's lobby shops downtown as part of a daylong anti-K Street extravaganza," the story at Huffington Post reported.

What's causing this sudden uptick in workers' messy confrontations with the owning class, practically unknown in recent times? BP's greasy disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, which now (in the words of Kunstler, again) "lies quivering in deep waters off the Gulf coast, like some awful amorphous Moby Dick full of malice waiting to sink Pequod America" is surely playing some part. So did the tongue-tied responses of Goldman's top executives in front of a Senatorial committee that roasted them alive on national TV a couple weeks ago.

But contributing even more to the ignition of noisy public discontent is the growing awareness of the increasingly bifurcated condition of American society, acknowledged this morning by sources deep within the belly of the whale: a former Federal Reserve official quoted by the Bloomberg News Service.

The U.S. economy may return to its pre-crisis peak next quarter after a recovery former Federal Reserve official Peter Hooper calls “surprisingly strong, historically weak,” which has seen corporations and the rich prosper while small companies and the unemployed struggle.

(Snip)

Unemployment, at 9.9 percent, is near a 27-year high as employers have cut payrolls by eight million since July 2007. The rate is more than twice the 4.7 percent reported by the Labor Department prior to the start of the recession in December 2007.

“It’s not just about Wall Street vs. Main Street,” said Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive officer of Pacific Investment Management Co., the Newport Beach, California-based manager of the world’s largest bond fund. “It’s about large companies versus small companies and wealthy households versus those less well off.”

Yep. Us versus them. It's been that way for a long time now, and class warfare is finally coming out into the open.