1848+: Last and First Men

Jobs for All, Medicare for All, More Social Security
by ROBERT ROTH
In a helpful review and constructive critique of the current status of the Occupy movement, Ismael Hossein-Zadeh makes several good suggestions. And I’ve seen some other comments more recently that seem worth sharing with you, in case you haven’t seen them. Hossein-Zadeh focuses on proposing demands for the movement, and as I generally agree with that approach, that discussion makes up the bulk of this entry. But I also cite and quote some other commentaries here, to present a broader set of views to help you make your own assessment. [Read more →]

Militancy and Counter-Insurgency
by MIKE KING
A crowd of several hundred quickly swelled to a couple thousand, as Occupy Oakland attempted to occupy the vacant Kaiser Convention Center. The goal was to use it as an indoor base for Occupy Oakland – a place to have General Assemblies and meetings, share food and get shelter for the winter. This was in keeping with what Occupy Oakland has always done, a goal that is simple, though not simple enough for the mainstream media to understand and honestly report. As in Argentina, Oaxaca, or Egypt, when society makes life unlivable for some and miserable for others, we will come together, decide what we need to do to meet our own needs in a directly democratic fashion, and do it. It is not surprising that people meeting their own needs outside of the control of the various forces that maintain the existing social order is going to be attacked. When people attempting to fill their own needs and the needs of the community are seen as socially unacceptable, the need for an entirely different social order becomes abundantly clear. From the diverse group of people who came out to take that space on Saturday, that understanding is not just held by a small group of militants. Despite the fact that the city government is run by corporate profiteers and liberal charlatans, and the federally coordinated police apparatus often looks far less intelligent than we usually give them credit for, the State knows the threat that exists in Oakland. They are responding accordingly. Saturday’s attacks are part of an ongoing counter-insurgency campaign to attempt to strip the movement of its substantial legitimacy, to intimidate, to harass, to divide, to contain, to co-opt, and to eventually destroy Occupy Oakland. The lines in this ongoing conflict are clear. The City’s overwhelming use of force and mass arrests, firing less-than-lethal weapons into marches with many children, the violent beatings, and the trumped-up charges in response to a peaceful attempt to make social use out of an unused building makes the State’s position clear. What is not clear is who will eventually win.

With all of that said, we are fighting them where they are strong with actions like Saturday’s. Oakland is known far and wide as the home of the Raiders, the birthplace of the Panthers, and the stomping ground of one of the most violent gangs in the country – the Oakland Police Department. We need to think about how to build a movement that is not just militant, but smart. Occupy Oakland is both of those things, but we need to be honing our strategic smarts rather than calling out the town bully in his backyard, on his terms. This should not get read as an effort to add to the mass media echo chamber shamelessly apologizing for the actions of the police; I’m bailing out good friends while I write this. Oakland is the birthplace of the Panthers, it is also, not coincidentally, a place that has a long history of counter-insurgency against social movements and communities of color. The police response Saturday; the media analysis; Mayor Quan’s call for people to support non-profits over mutual aid and to politically divide people by race in the process; Quan’s attempt to call on people in the US Occupy movement to condemn Oakland; trying to keep organizers going back and forth to court rather than organizing, etc. – all of this is counter-insurgency. Militancy alone will not win this war.

“Whose Legitimacy? Our Legitimacy!”

Oakland Occupy Patriarchy’s assessment and analysis illustrates both the public support the action received as well as the tactics of the police. The police used rubber bullets, tear gas, bean-bag munitions, at one point on a crowd that had an organized group of children in it. The police kettled a march at 19th and Telegraph, where protesters were able to escape, and kettled them again at 23rd and Broadway in front of the YMCA. YMCA workers opened their doors to protesters being violently attacked by police. Some people who allegedly took the shelter that the YMCA workers offered are facing felony burglary charges.

The Occupy Patriarchy article speaks to an instructive moment that took place as they were leaving the Traveler’s Aid building which is currently being renovated and that protesters unsuccessfully tried to re-occupy on Saturday. As the protesters were leaving, the renovation workers shouted their support, while full solidarity on that day was thwarted by cops, managers and financial obligations. Over 300 people are in jail and the occupation was not successful, but the “battle for hearts and minds” is up in the air. Mayor Quan responds by blaming protesters for the lack of police response to crime in Oakland over the weekend, a tactic she has used in the past and has since had to retract. A city that lays off city workers to fund an enormous police budget, and closes schools and cuts social services in order to spend millions on crooked bank deals or to fund housing foreclosures will try to patronize the people of Oakland while stealing their future. The people of Oakland are not stupid. The fact that there is an open, democratic movement trying to fill the innumerable political and economic holes of the neoliberal city, scares the hell out of the Mayor, Homeland Security and everyone in between. As well it should.

Counter-Insurgency: Oakland’s Iron Fist – Velvet Glove Combination

The goal of counter-insurgency is to employ as many tools as possible to destroy a movement – through misinformation and disruption, through discrediting and breeding conflict within the movement, and through employing various mechanisms of harassment, surveillance and force. It is a broad strategy that draws on riot cops, but it also draws on ministers, the media, non-profits and others to bolster the legitimacy of the State, while attacking or undermining the movement. It uses a combination of what they call “hard” and “soft” power, utilizing the both the State’s “legitimate use of force,” but also its power to control knowledge and communication, as well as the capacity to grant concessions in order to retain power.

Before Saturday’s violent repression of the attempted building occupation, the City released a statement laying all the counter-insurgency cards on the table. They drew on the “outside agitator” trope, trying to portray the Fuck the Police marches that have been happening, called for by the Tactical Action Committee (a group of young black men from Oakland), as mainly people, not just from other cities, but other regions and states. The release also argues that Occupy Oakland is a major reason for the city’s budget problems. To put this in context, the City of Oakland over-pays Goldman Sachs on their debt to the tune of $5 million every year (about $38 million total), while the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) reports in a modest estimate, the city has spent $224 million foreclosing upon working class families in recent years, contributing to Oakland’s black population shrinking by 25% in the last 10 years. The city will have a budget deficit of about $50 million this year, after massive cuts to everything but the police last year, official unemployment is almost 10%, and the Mayor argues the $5 million dollars they have spent attacking Occupy Oakland in the last 4 months is not only justified, it is the primary reason the City finances are a disaster.

The City’s statement goes on to argue that they have a long lineage of addressing inequality, while, according to the US census, the metro-region has the 7th highest level of inequality in the entire country (Gini coeffecient). The city says it has a commitment to helping the poor, addressing the housing crisis, and creating employment – and then points to non-governmental organizations that provide social services, asking concerned citizens to support a range of non-profits, and reject Occupy Oakland. Non-profits are getting used by the City, here, to undermine the movement, offering a “legitimate” way to create social change.

One of the non-profits, Just Cause, participated in the Occupy National Day of Action Against Foreclosures on December 6, 2011. After the cameras left and Just Cause had stepped away, the house was eventually occupied by the Tactical Action Committee and others who were transforming the space into a community center, with community survival programs in West Oakland. The house was eventually attacked by the police and now lies vacant. When Just Cause was involved the house received little harassment, unlike Occupy Oakland’s re-occupation in the same neighborhood that same day. When black organizers who grew up in that neighborhood tried making it a vehicle of community empowerment and self-sufficiency it was promptly attacked by OPD. Non-profits mostly serve to fill the social services vacuum left by budget cuts, keeping people alive in an era of neoliberalism. At their best, they are still neither a structural solution to inequality or a political threat to the existing structures of power. This is the reason they are being called upon to serve as a political buffer that will try to claim ownership of legitimate community organizing in Oakland.

This is counter-insurgency. The ‘outside agitator’ argument, trying to paint the movement as violent, using certain non-profits as a buffer. For weeks the police have been raiding groups of people in Oscar Grant Plaza and giving them stay-away orders that prohibit them from being in the Plaza. This is the same type of technique the city has been using in North Oakland and the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland to harass communities of color (gang injunctions), and it is likely a civil rights violation. The second raid of Occupy Oakland’s camp, along with 17 other cities, was coordinated by Homeland Security. Mayor Quan’s Block-by Block “grassroots organization” has meetings they now call General Assemblies and some of its members attempted to set up a Mayor-Quan-sanctioned “peace camp” in November, before the second raid of Occupy Oakland’s camp. Yesterday the Mayor said she was going to call on the “leaders of the national Occupy movement” (whoever that is supposed to be) and ask them to condemn Occupy Oakland for not being non-violent. Corporations and labor law have threatened the ILWU with lawsuits if they collaborate directly with Occupy. The media has made committed efforts to drive wedges between unions and the movement. The mass media also focuses on property destruction or harp that the movement is dying, while never mentioning or covering our actions at workplaces or in the community reclaiming foreclosed houses. The Mayor, the City, the OPD, Homeland Security and other federal “political police,” selected non-profits, the media, union leaderships – this is modern counter-insurgency.

All of this seeks to drive wedges on tactics, race, politics, etc. and create further mistrust and hostility between non-profits, individuals and communities not largely involved in Occupy Oakland and Occupy Oakland – to breed conflict between people not in communication with each other to make future communication and collaboration impossible. The State wants to discredit, marginalize and destroy this movement and have it seem like it tore itself apart. The movement must come to terms with the counter-insurgency it faces and strategically navigate the trap-filled maze that has been put before us.

Militance, Strategy and the Quest to Beat the Bully

“We do not support people who are anarchistic, opportunistic, adventuristic, and Custeristic.” – Black Panther leader, Fred Hampton, about Weatherman, after the Days of Rage in Chicago (1969)

In the Fall of 1969, Weatherman had militant Days of Rage protests in Chicago. Despite much outreach and planning, 2000 cops outnumbered street militants 2 to 1. With little to no reflexivity, Weatherman concluded that everyone was bought-off by imperialism and soon left to pursue more militant action underground. The movement, today, should not commit itself to non-violence and doom itself to repeat the generations-long cycle of pacifist failure within the US Left. We need to learn from history, and our mistakes. We also need to see the nature of the strategies being used against us and strategically act accordingly. If we simply go directly at the State, making threats we have no capacity to back up, the State will keep coming at us until we are gone.

If the movement is a school-kid who just had his lunch stolen and the State is the bully that took it, if you go up and try to take it back he will likely punch you in the eye. Is it justified? No. Is the bully right, does he deserve your lunch? Of course not. Is the lunch-less kid somewhat responsible for his swollen face? Unfortunately, yes – because the bully’s behavior is thoroughly predictable. So does the State just get to keep eating our lunch? No. We could have a friend distract the bully and then take back our lunch. Or, better yet, we could go find all the other kids who have had their lunch stolen, meet up, come up with a plan – and then overrun him. That is a social revolution.

Revolution is about strategy more than militancy. Sitting with undocumented workers in the Fruitvale, sick people without healthcare Downtown, grandmothers who have lost their grandkids to police violence East Oakland, parents who are seeing their kids’ school closed near Lake Merritt, or families who have lost their home in West Oakland – and seeing what their realities are and what they want to do to change those realities through the Occupy movement is a bigger threat to the State than street militancy, not that we likely won’t need a bit of street militancy along the way. Pulling people together in a democratic movement to meet our collective needs, building relationships and solidarity, and then activating it – that is what it will take to take the bully down for good.

The State, through counter-insurgency, will do everything in its power to thwart our rage against the existing order, it will also stop at nothing to smother the love and solidarity needed to create a new world. Our love and our rage are our two greatest weapons. We have to find a balance between the two in our organizing and in our strategy, that takes into account likely responses from our enemies. If we simply want to box with the police in the middle of the street, we might go more rounds than some people expect, there will be cool videos to put on YouTube, but we will lose. And the media will be out front every time to whittle our ranks for the next fight. Instead of rehashing a de-contextualized and non-dialectic debate about non-violence versus a diversity of tactics, we should be debating the strategy that is going to take us from where we are to where we want to go.

[Critique aside, a primary obligation of any social movement is to take care of those targeted by the police. Occupy Oakland’s bail-fund is depleted and many people are facing serious charges. The link to donate is here.]

Mike King is a PhD candidate at UC–Santa Cruz and an East Bay activist. He can be reached at mking(at)ucsc.edu.

Published on Saturday, January 28, 2012 by Reuters
The Siren Call of Austerity
by David Cay Johnston
The World Economic Forum opened in Davos amid choruses of central bankers and economists calling for governments to cut spending.
This message of austerity is like the call of the ancient Sirens, whose music lured sailors to shipwreck.We should take a lesson from Odysseus, who poured wax into the ears of his crew and had himself lashed to the mast of his ship to resist the Siren call.

Austerity supporters are selling the idea that governments, like families, must cut back when income shrinks. But economically, governments are not like families.

Firing teachers, cops and government clerks will, for sure, reduce public spending. But budgets, like the song of the Sirens, are only part of the story. Listen only to the alluring lyrics and, like the many voyagers before Odysseus, we will suffer disastrous consequences – in our case falling incomes and worsening economies.

The full economic story begins with this principle taught to every economics student: spending equals income and income equals spending. Cut spending and incomes must fall; cut incomes and spending must fall.

Those who disagree with this say that only private spending can create wealth and that government spending is inefficient. I think the first argument is wrong, but the second is often true, which is why citizens need to pay close attention to their government.

When private spending shrinks, then either government spending must grow to make up for it or the other side of the equation, income, must shrink.

If we increase spending today by borrowing, we create a claim on future income. Families with debt must divert part of their future income to interest and principal to service that debt or go bankrupt. Governments are different, provided they have monopoly control of their currency. By definition, no sovereign government can ever go broke in its own currency.

NO TO AUSTERITY

The United States government, which has a monopoly on its currency, is $15.2 trillion in debt, roughly the same as the entire output of the economy for a year.

That figure has been sung in a refrain about massive debt threatening to bring down the economy and cause inflation. Facts, however, show otherwise.

In Japan, government debt is roughly twice annual economic output and yet the country continues to function because real interest rates are at or below zero.

To be sure, conditions can change and interest rates can rise sharply, though central banks have ways to limit that. But that is not the problem today. The problem today is shrinking incomes due to shrinking spending.

Austerity budgets, by reducing government spending, will only make incomes fall more. The only way to make incomes rise is to make spending rise, which in the short run means more borrowing by governments to enable more public sector spending.

After reading the news from Davos, ask yourself why we should listen to the Siren song of the financial elite. After all, the people who steered our financial ship into dangerous waters in the first place were at the very top of this group. We should listen more to those will suffer from austerity budgets: children who only get one chance at an education, the sick and disabled unable to support themselves and seniors too old to work.

If, like Odysseus, we wish to row past our current economic straits into a new sea of prosperity, the one thing we must not do is be driven to economic madness by the Siren call of austerity budgets.

© 2012 David Cay Johnston
David Cay Johnston is the author of Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill).

more David Cay Johnston

Published on Saturday, January 28, 2012 by Common Dreams
Occupying the Grounds of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry
- Common Dreams staff
Japanese anti-nuclear protesters defied a government order Friday to vacate the area in front of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in Tokyo’s Kasumigaseki. Protesters have been occupying the Ministry grounds since Sept. 11, 2011.
Antinuclear activists camping out at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry refused to take down their tents Friday despite an order to do so by 5 p.m.

Hundreds of people meanwhile came to see the three tents around the deadline, apparently to show their support for the protesters.

About 10 of the activists have regularly stayed in the tents since September.

METI on Wednesday handed the protesters an order to remove their tents by 5 p.m. Friday because they “continued to use fires even though we repeatedly told them not to,” official Hideyuki Maekawa said.

But shortly after 5 p.m., Maekawa told The Japan Times the ministry was not taking any action against the protesters and instead hopes they “will leave voluntarily.”

The protesters meanwhile argued they have the right to stay there to continue their demonstration calling for termination of all nuclear power plant operations.

“We feel we have the right to stay here. We understand it is unlawful to stay on somebody’s premises without authorization. But this space is a very public place, which gives us right to be here,” one of their leaders, restaurant owner Taro Fuchigami, told The Japan Times. [...]

The protesters began camping out at the corner of the ministry Sept. 11. They applied for permission Sept. 13 to pitch their tents there, but METI denied the request Sept. 29, both Maekawa and Fuchigami said. [...]

Maekawa said the protesters have been technically breaking the law since Sept. 29, but METI effectively allowed them to stay because “people can have different opinions.”

However, the ministry changed its attitude because the protesters kept using open flames to cook and keep warm despite METI’s admonishments.

# # #

Published on Friday, January 27, 2012 by In These Times
Liberals’ Inequality Narrative Ignores Role of Free Trade, Unionbusting
by Roger Bybee
The Occupy movement forcefully injected a long-taboo topic—America’s appalling “banana republic”-level economic disparities—into the mainstream political debate.
That inequality has immense implications, from falling wages, to deteriorating healthcare coverage, the overgrown financial sector, and the decline of America’s productive base. Such sweeping inequality, deeply rooted in our economic and political system of legal payoffs and policy paybacks, has been intensified by union-busting and globalization.

But even many of America’s most liberal mainstream politicians and pundits have narrowed the debate over inequality, perhaps out of a desire to shield President Obama from any pressure coming from his left. The issue of tax inequities has soared in importance, exposing the privileged status enjoyed by CEOs and hedge fund and private equity executives like Mitt Romney. But other crucial dimensions of inequality painfully experienced by ordinary Americans have been crowded out.

For example, the liberal and likable Lawrence O’Donnell, host of MSNBC’s The Last Word, declares in a TV ad that all the talk about “class war” amounts to a battle over a proposed 4 percent increase in tax rates for the super-rich. Really, Lawrence?

The richest 1 percent did not triple their share of the nation’s income during the last three decades—to the current 24 percent—simply through the tax system alone. Nor did the tax system allow the wealthiest 1 percent to capture nearly 9/10 of productivity gains in recent years, representing a $3 billion upward shift in income.

American media employ a disproportionately large share of pundits who either deny or defend the riches accruing to America’s “job creators”—ranging from the outraged George Will to the sly discounting of the problem by NPR’s Adam Davidson. They are accompanied by a chorus of leading voices—Thomas Friedman and Fareed Zakaria, to name just two, who gloss over the inequities caused by global corporate supremacy.

Even the supposedly liberal pundits—E.J. Dionne, Howard Fineman, Jonathan Alter, Ezra Klein and Richard Wolffe, among others—are remarkably confined in their discussions of inequality. They almost never refer to the 35-year campaign of union-busting by Corporate America, in which 90 percent of union organizing drives are greeted with high-pressure resistance from management, according to Christopher Martin’s 2003 book on media coverage of labor, Framed!.

The crucial fact that 31,358 workers get fired in a typical year while trying to unionize their workplace, according to author Philip Dine, is almost uniformly omitted from liberal pundits’ explanations of U.S. inequality. Only in their coverage of public-employee battles in Wisconsin did MSNBC hosts like Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz discuss union-busting and its role in pushing down wages and eliminating workers’ voice on the job.

The other central weapon in the class war against workers—the threat or actual relocation of production to brutal low-wage conditions found in Mexico and China—has been almost entirely absent from the comments of MSNBC hosts and guests.

John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s and author of the superb 2000 book on NAFTA,“The Selling of Free Trade, believes that too many liberal and progressive commentators and pundits have been afraid of criticizing President Obama on a fundamental issue of loyalty to working-class interests. “The so-called liberal media and even its leftish fringe are almost all in the bag for Obama,” said MacArthur, whose book extensively details the almost-unanimous endorsement of NAFTA by the US press corps in 1992 and 1993.

“Obama has been terrible on these issues of globalization,” says MacArthur, pointing to his abandonment of his promise to re-negotiate NAFTA. (The President has even failed to enforce the weak side agreements on labor and environmental issues, following in the footsteps of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush).

Yet the liberal politicians and media voices who should be challenging the role of free-trade and union-busting in driving down wages and increasing inequality have almost uniformly remained silent. While liberal on a wide variety of issues, pundits like Dionne and Wolffe continue to adhere to the free-trade faith without examining its consequences in lost jobs, depressed wages and devastated factory towns.

Others seem to be operating from the notion that any criticism of Obama will weaken his chances for re-election. “Meanwhile, Obama’s raising money from all the corporate interests who benefit [from free trade],” MacArthur notes. “People who should be speaking out—like Sen. Sherrod Brown [D-Ohio]—are just not doing it.”

Auto bailout far from ideal

To be a bit more specific: Obama’s “bailout” of the auto industry has been portrayed by liberals, especially Ed Schultz, as an unalloyed success. Led by Wall Street financier Steven Rattner, the program caused tens of thousands of GM and Chrysler workers to lose their jobs; federal funds allowed a Chrysler engine-production unit to be shifted from Kenosha, Wis. to Saltillo, Mexico; the number of GM cars imported into the country from Mexico, China, and elsewhere is almost doubled; and no vacant plants were converted to the domestic manufacturing of mass transit equipment.

The valid criticisms of the bailout, raised by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, auto industry expert Prof. Harley Shaiken and others have been borne out, but nonetheless almost entirely forgotten. In his State of the Union address this week, President Obama highlighted the auto industry bailout as one of his signature achievements.

MacArthur notes that when Obama aide David Axelrod was interviewed by CNN’s Candy Crowley, she asked him how the auto bailout was different from what Mitt Romney had done at Bain Capital, a private-equity firm that laid off workers and shut down plants. “Axelrod was really left fumbling for an answer,” he said.

The point is not to sink Obama with a fusillade of criticism about the off-shoring of jobs promoted by the free trade agreements he pushed through Congress, but to hold him at least minimally accountable on issues that are crucial to workers so that we do not see an electoral re-run of 2010 this year, when alienated blue-collar workers stay at home, and some vote Republican.

“Here we have the right wing attacking Romney about Bain Capital plundering companies and shutting down plants and moving jobs overseas. The left wing ought to be making a similar critique of Obama,” MacArthur says.

Without any audible and visible pressure to aggressively move to lift wages and control the export of jobs, Obama will simply fall back on pleading with executives to engage in “insourcing” jobs, and then exaggerate the importance of a minor, perhaps inconsequential, trend.

But most of the public, wary of free-trade agreements, knows that the trickle of jobs returning to the U.S. is far smaller than the torrent headed to China and Mexico, a torrent that continues to decimate the families and communities that were once part of the nation’s strong industrial base.

© 2012 In These Times
Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer and progressive publicity consultant whose work has appeared in numerous national publications and websites, including Z magazine, Common Dreams, Dollars & Sense, Yes!, The Progressive, Multinational Monitor, The American Prospect and Foreign Policy in Focus.

Published on Saturday, January 28, 2012 by the Cleveland Plain Dealer
The Heroes of Wall Street: How Democrats Got Their Pockets Picked
by Kevin Horrigan
It’s hard to read Thomas Frank’s new book, “Pity the Billionaire,” without being astonished at what utter nincompoops Democrats are.

This surely was not Frank’s primary intent. The book is subtitled, “The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right,” so it’s pretty clear where Frank coming from. But the obvious subtext is how, in a two-party system, Democrats allowed Republicans to pull off the greatest cross-dressing scam since RuPaul became America’s Drag Queen.

Frank is a journalist and polemicist best known for his 2004 book “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” that explored how Republicans in his home state had used social issues to persuade people to vote against their own economic best interests.

In “Pity the Billionaire,” he examines how Republicans — with help from some Democrats –created policies that led to the financial collapse of 2008, the Great Recession, massive income inequality and the gutting of the middle class. And then the Democrats sat back as the GOP reinvented itself as populist defenders of free-market capitalism.

“Now there is nothing really novel about the idea that free markets are the very essence of freedom,” Frank writes. “What is new is the glorification of this idea at the precise moment when free-market theory has proven itself to be a philosophy of ruination and fraud. The revival of the Right is as extraordinary as it would be if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear power plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster; if we had reacted to Watergate by making Richard Nixon a national hero.”

For Frank, a key moment in this bizarre turn of events came on Feb. 19, 2009, less than a month after President Barack Obama’s inauguration. The TARP bailout bill proposed by President George W. Bush and endorsed by candidate Obama had been passed the previous fall. The new president had just signed the $787 billion economic stimulus bill.

On that day, CNBC business reporter Rick Santelli stood on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade and began ranting about the unfairness of it all. Not the bank bailout, mind you, but the 6.3 percent of the TARP program intended to help people modify their underwater mortgages.

As it turned out, this program hasn’t been particularly successful because banks refused to go along. But on that Feb. 19, Santelli was incensed at the unfairness of it all — that “losers” with bad mortgages might be helped and that the salt-of-the-earth traders who were cheering him on were being punished for being successful and prudent.

Santelli’s rant went viral on the Internet. So-called Tea Party rallies began to be held. “Your mortgage is not my problem,” read a sign at one of them.

Self-promoters seized them as a way to cash in — a fine conservative tradition, Frank writes — and the right-wing foundations funneled money to them. What could have been, and should have been, populist outrage against the people whose greed brought the house down was subtly turned into protests against “elitists” (i.e., Democrats) who were attacking “free markets” (i.e., cracking down on banks and health care costs).

The Tea Party, Frank says, became defenders of a Darwinian version of free markets intended to “trample the weak.”

Frank spends a great deal of attention on the various absurdities peddled at the time by Glenn Beck on Fox News — “bogus populism shores up ironclad elitism and … bogus enlightenment serves the most grotesque form of dupery.”

But Beck and his ilk could not have gotten away with it had (a) people been more discerning about what they were hearing and (b) had Democrats mounted some kind of response.

As to (a), Frank quotes from one of the Tea Party’s favorite movies, “Network,” where the mad-as-hell-not-going-to-take-it-any-more newscaster Howard Beale explains, “We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true. But you people sit there day after day … we’re all you know.”

As to (b), the question of where the Democratic response was, that’s still a mystery. Aside from perhaps Elizabeth Warren, architect of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and now a U.S. Senate candidate in Massachusetts, no Democrat has been particularly successful in articulating where the blame belongs.

Until recently, Obama floated above it all, finding common cause with Wall Street and health insurance firms, trying to compromise with people who were elected not to compromise, playing his preferred “long game,” avoiding intemperate language.

This allowed the GOP to retake control of the House and pass themselves off as defenders of the average guy. And anyone who has the temerity to point out how stupid you’d be to fall for that is labeled an “elitist.” As the British political scientists David Runciman has noted, “There is nothing voters hate more than having things explained to them as though they were idiots.”

Republicans understand that. Democrats aren’t very good at it. If they hope to avoid catastrophe in November, they’d better figure it out.