Clara Jeffery

Illustration by Dale Stephanos

A few weeks after the Occupy Wall Street protests began, we found ourselves having a random conversation with a couple of San Franciscans at a store counter. What were these kids going on about? they asked. Time was tight, the inquiry a pleasantry, really. Best to keep it simple. "Jobs, the economy, income inequality." Well, one offered, he knew the wife of Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf, and according to him, the reason companies aren't hiring is because they are worried about the extra cost of Obama's health care reform.

Stunned silence.

Because what can you really say to that, except…let them eat cake? Stumpf made $17.6 million in 2010—672 times what the average American takes home. And say what you will about Obamacare, but for large companies that already offer health benefits, it imposes pretty much zero costs and might even save money.

But why single out Stumpf, who actually sounds fairly cuddly for a bank CEO? (His hobby is baking bread, for Christ's sake.) Let's turn instead to John Paulson, the billionaire hedge fund manager who unctuously admonished Occupy protesters: "Instead of vilifying our most successful businesses, we should be supporting them and encouraging them to remain in New York City and continue to grow." Or how about the homeless-themed Halloween party thrown by an upstate New York foreclosure mill? Or the financier David Moore, who, having been dressed down by a panhandler for proffering only a dollar, took to the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages to bray about Obama's class-warfare rhetoric: "The president's incendiary message has now reached the streets. His complaints that rich people must 'pay their fair share' have now goaded some of our society's most unfortunate."

Are all of the 1 percent so unmoored from the concerns of ordinary people? We've asked friends in high finance how their colleagues feel about the Occupy protests. Some, we're told, see them as hacky-sacking WTO wannabes, but a more insightful contingent regards the movement as akin to Europe's anti-austerity demonstrations: the understandable yet futile raging of people stranded by the shifting tides of the global economy.

This is a sentiment worth interrogating a bit, for it is a popular one among the Davos class. Sorry, American and European masses: We know you liked secure jobs that paid a living wage and held the promise of a cat-food-free retirement. But, well, that was then. The things you used to make are made elsewhere; now the knowledge economy the pundits wax about has gone global too. You're up against a lot of bright kids in Beijing, Bangalore, and Brasília, and know what? You can't compete.

There's some truth to this. But let's keep in mind that, globalization notwithstanding, the US economy is far wealthier now than it was a couple of decades ago—our GDP per capita is up 24 percent (PDF) just since 1995. The problem is not scarcity; it's that a tiny number of players get rewarded no matter how badly they screw up. Recall that one of the things that gave Occupy Wall Street escape velocity was Bank of America's decision to slap a $5-per-month fee onto everyone's debit card—just as it handed a pair of hapless executives golden parachutes to the tune of $11 million.

"Let me give you a hint that will save you countless hours and millions of dollars spent on consultants and the public relations morons you keep on staff," observed investment adviser Joshua Brown, who blogs at The Reformed Broker. "This is why they hate you. You want to roll your eyes and make snide remarks about 'dumb college kids' and 'socialists'? Go ahead, but you're missing the point. Because it is the small business owner who's really been wronged here, not the fringe elements you mockingly dismiss. The business owner whose losses are not socialized like yours, the business owner without the government in his pocket, the business owner who is forced to play by the rules that you have paid to have written. He's not a hippie, he's not a Marxist…but he's waking up, dummy."

Waking up to what, exactly? In chronicling Occupy Wall Street, it struck us that the protesters, the passersby, and even the cops weren't just pissed about being permanently gated off from the spoils of the über-rich. Oh no. What they were really pissed about is that the megawealthy and Washington have become so symbiotic as to be a single entity. Indeed, Occupy's best move, as conservative blogger/financier Gregory Djerejian noted at TheAtlantic.com, was "directing their ire squarely toward the real elites of the country, rather than their bought-and-paid marionettes sitting in Washington." You didn't have to spend long at the edge of Zuccotti Park before you heard the phrase Citizens United, as folks who'd come to see the camp from New Jersey, Texas, and Montana began to contemplate the connection between their anemic bank accounts and political decisions that line the pockets of those already most advantaged.

Americans are not opposed to the rich getting richer—as John Steinbeck is said to have noted, "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." But this prospect only satisfies so long as people believe that with luck and hard work, their ship, or at least their kids' ship, may some day come in. In a system overrun by piracy—a system in which the pirates also, sorry to stretch the metaphor, run the Navy—the dream becomes hard to sustain.

The 1 percent have always had outsize influence, but not since the robber-baron era have they been able to throw their weight around so exuberantly. Our lawmakers might as well wear NASCAR-type logos signaling their corporate sponsors. And you can kiss judicial propriety goodbye when Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia dine with the law firm challenging Obamacare on the very day the Supreme Court decides to take the case. That's the selfsame court that cannot brook any restriction on the amount a company (er, person) chooses to spend to influence elections, the selfsame Congress that conveniently can't stomach the most elementary disclosure rules.

Case in point: Campaign spending by the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors has grown about eightfold since 1990 and reached $500 million for the '08 election. On one hand, that sounds like real money; on the other, it's only what Bank of America earns in a week. In any case, it's one of Wall Street's safest bets: Big Finance invests in politicians who enable it to play ever riskier games with other people's money, generating ever more fantastical returns, a tiny portion of which is invested back in political giving, which further cements a favorable regulatory environment…a perfect self-sustaining cycle.

And now, the decades-long crusade by the brightest minds of Washington to turn back the post-Watergate election laws (prompted by oh, say, Archer Daniels Midland CEO Dwayne Andreas stuffing $100,000 in an unmarked envelope for Richard Nixon) has finally triumphed. Brace yourself: The Koch brothers and their fellow gazillionaires are about to make Andreas look like a Boy Scout. When people feel screwed economically and see no redress politically, guess what happens? Boston shopkeepers dump tea in the harbor. Mobs roam the streets of 1863 New York City shouting, "There goes a $300 man!"—the amount wealthy draftees paid to send a poor kid to be cannon fodder in their stead. The Bonus Army encamps in Washington. The petulant wealthy would also do well to remember that part of what precipitated the French Revolution was the nobility's réfus, in the face of desperate pleas from Louis XVI, to consider paying taxes at a time when large portions of the crushingly taxed citizenry were literally starving.

The revolution that preceded that one—ours—sprang from the insight that a just government derives its power from the consent of the governed. And if the Occupy movement has accomplished nothing else, it's provided a vehicle for many people to consider whether anyone actually bothered to obtain their consent before eliminating the basic safeguards of democracy. While the media and political professionals fixated on the movement's lack of demands, they missed the real story. It wasn't about demands; it was about diagnosis.

The occupations provided a catalyst, but the most interesting conversations haven't taken place in the camps via the human mic. They've happened among the millions of people who found that kids in tents were quite effectively articulating their own sense of abandonment. What comes next is the question that should occupy us in 2012, and beyond.

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Illustration: Tomer Hanuka

Among the many ritual ablutions a Republican presidential contender must perform is the signing of Grover Norquist's "Taxpayer Protection Pledge," a document the length and subtlety of a bumper sticker that commits politicians to oppose "any and all efforts to increase taxes." To date, all the GOP hopefuls, save Jon Huntsman, have signed on, as have 238 House members (99 percent of the GOP caucus), 41 senators, and more than 1,200 state legislators (PDF).

Norquist, a professional conservative and Washington salonista, drew up the pledge in 1986 at the behest of Ronald Reagan (who had signed a major federal tax increase a few years earlier, but never mind). It was part of the Republicans' nascent "starve the beast" campaign, which postulated that since cutting public services would always be unpopular, the way to shrink the government was to give it little more than hardtack. The movement erupted into full bloom in 2001, when Congress passed the Bush tax cut package; at the time, Norquist crowed: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

Leaving aside the metaphor's casual brutality (what can you really drown in the tub? A puppy? A child?), shrinking government wasn't on the agenda. Not really. Wars of choice, Medicare Part D—George W. Bush cranked up federal spending, and Norquist and his pledges didn't kick.

[Read the full article]

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President Obama and Speaker John Boehner at their June "golf summit." Charles Dharapak/AP Photo

Sometime in the '50s, the story goes, a small plane ran into engine trouble over Bethesda, Maryland, and was forced to crash-land near the 18th hole of a bucolic golf club. Employees rushed to the scene, and—upon discovering that the pilot was a woman—had her "very gingerly and gallantly" removed from the grounds.

Three decades later, when a visiting head of state showed up at the same golf club with a complement of Secret Service agents, the lone woman among them couldn't set foot on the property. In 1981, a new Supreme Court appointee with a love of golf and a 12 handicap—Sandra Day O'Connor—became the first justice not to be offered a membership. That same chivalry has since been extended to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.

Burning Tree Club's logo.

Honorary membership at Burning Tree Club is not to be sneezed at, seeing as how the initiation fee is north of $75,000, plus another $6,000 per year and tips for the caddie. Still, not all male Supreme Court justices in recent years have accepted the club's offer, though Antonin Scalia did. So did presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and George H.W. Bush. Indeed, according to an encyclopedic 2003 ESPN.com piece by Greg Garber, Ike was persuaded to run for office by fellow club members and subsequently "spent so much time at 'The Tree' that a hot line was installed between the White House and the pro shop."

We were moved to take this detour into archaic Washington folkways because of June's debt ceiling "golf summit" between President Obama and Speaker John Boehner, which, as some reporters noted, took place at the Andrews Air Force Base course because the president couldn't very well play Boehner's regular club—Burning Tree.

Deep breath. Okay. It is 2011. Boehner is the speaker of the House. The body that is supposed to, more than any other, represent the people—all the people—of the United States of America. Yet 91 years after women won the right to vote and 40 years after our mothers fought for more than token access to the levers of power, the signal the man second in line for the presidency intends to send to 51 percent of the nation, 40 percent of Republicans, and his own daughters is...well, we're too ladylike to say.

And yes, intends: The optics of belonging to one of America's last 24 boys-only golf clubs have been brought to Boehner's attention many, many times before. Evidently, Neanderthal sexism is simply another thing he refuses to compromise on.

Photo: Library of CongressBut don't feel left out, guys: The speaker's contempt is not confined to those of the female persuasion. From the glass ceiling to the debt ceiling, Boehner and the rest of the GOP brass are not only ignoring the needs of the majority of Americans, they are actively flipping all of us the bird. And that is something new.

Back in the innocent days of yore—say, six months ago—a politician who did not at least lip-synch concern for the welfare of the American people in the event of an economic tailspin would have gotten a drubbing in the press and a talking-to from his caucus leader. Now? It's the caucus leader himself who brutally spells out the priorities: No. 1, says Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, is ensuring that Obama is "a one-term president." No. 2 is protecting "your [Republican] brand." That's right—the reason to worry about a downturn that could kill millions of jobs and wipe out what's left of our retirement and housing values is that it might interfere with GOP positioning.

Which takes us back to golf. George W. Bush gave up the game after starting the Iraq War. Boehner's cohorts seem less worried about looking out of touch: Just in the past two years, the speaker's Freedom Project PAC has spent more than $170,000 on golf, $64,000 at the Naples, Florida, Ritz-Carlton alone!

It's worth noting here that Boehner doesn't come to this callousness by dint of entitlement—one of 12 siblings, he was the first in his family to go to college—which makes his constant gestures of fealty to elites all the more striking. His attire the night he told the nation that he was protecting "the jobs and savings of Americans" by setting us on the path to economic calamity? Navy blazer, oxford shirt, kelly-green tie. Preppy Handbook, anyone?

So, note to President Obama: golf summit, sure. But don't forget that barring some Americans from the clubhouse stems from the same part of the cortex as barring others from the lunch counter. The foundational impulse for both is that fairness matters less than power.

Boehner may be, as the president has said, "a good man who wants to do right by the country." But it all depends, as a previous president might have noted, on what the definition of "the country" is. In today's Republican Party, that definition has shrunk to its narrowest point in at least half a century. And that, in the end, is John Boehner's true handicap.

Want to learn more about the debt ceiling fight? Read David Corn on the Obama administration's strategy, review our detailed, updated explainer on how we got to this point, and learn why Kevin Drum thinks the deal sucks. Still hungry? Andy Kroll has a great piece on what the deal means for our future.

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