Boom, we gonna get you too..

So why are the rich so rattled? Surely part of it is awareness of what they have gotten away with. They waged class warfare, as Warren Buffett noted, and they won. They rigged the rules and made out like bandits. And, like bandits, they look over their shoulder constantly, worried there must be a posse out there somewhere.

Katrina vanden Heuvel examines the reasons behind the fear permeating from the privileged classes:

In the United States, the rich, not the poor, are winning big. The obscene tax break for hedge fund operators still exists. The wealthy, such as Mitt Romney, still pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. Corporate and personal tax havens abroad still shelter trillions from taxes. Our perverse system of rewarding chief executives still bloats their salaries. The president is still promoting trade pacts negotiated in secret with corporations at the table.
...
The bankers helped blow up the economy and got bailed out. They engaged in what seems to be an unending list of criminal and fraudulent schemes, yet no leading bankers have been called to the dock.

Perhaps the poster child of this is JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, once known as President Obama’s “favorite banker.” On his watch, JPMorgan has settled claims of defrauding homeowners, breaking sanctions against Iran, turning a blind eye to Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, fleecing U.S. soldiers and more.

In the past year alone, JPMorgan forked over more than $20 billion in fines and penalties. Yet with no one personally held responsible, this seems merely a minor cost of doing business. Certainly Dimon’s board of directors thought so, giving him a 74 percent pay increase a few weeks after the settlement was disclosed.

A change is gonna come in the arc of justice ...
bank on it.

The small “d” democratic efforts to call the rich to account, to rescue democracy from the plutocrats, to rebuild an economy that works for working people have only begun. Occupy Wall Street put the issue on the table.

And the young people graduating into the most unequal economy since the Great Depression might just make this the moral cause of their generation.