Records show that in 2008, as an employee at Washington law firm Bryan Cave, Johnson lobbied for the $700 billion TARP bailout on behalf of the Financial Services Forum, which is composed of the CEOs of the 20 biggest financial institutions doing business in the United States. Forum members include big names like Goldman Sachs, UBS, AIG, Bank of America and Deutsche Bank.

From 2007 through the first quarter of 2011, Johnson and a handful of other Bryan Cave lobbyists were paid $450,000 by the Financial Services Forum, records show. Johnson and a small number of colleagues brought in a total of $1.3 million to Bryan Cave from the financial services industry over the past five years. That includes work he did for Fannie Mae, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase, the Electronic Payments Coalition and the investment firm J.C. Flowers.

Asked for details about Johnson’s work on the bailout, an Obama campaign spokesperson responded only that “Broderick is no longer a lobbyist — he deregistered in April — and he will not discuss any matters related to his clients with the campaign or administration.”

Because of the campaign’s reticence, we don’t know many of the details of Johnson’s work for the Financial Services Forum beyond the fact that at the height of the fall 2008 crisis, he lobbied on the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, which created the $700 billion TARP program. After the House narrowly defeated the first version of the bill in late September 2008, Financial Services Forum executive Rob Nichols sounded the alarm.

“Just as the cardiovascular system is the essential, life-sustaining system of the body, the financial system is the essential basis upon which the growth and vitality of all other sectors of the economy depend,” Nichols said. “We believe this legislation is critically important and should be enacted into law at the earliest possible time in order restore market stability and increase credit availability for Americans.”

Resentment over the bailouts lingers across the political spectrum, from the Tea Party to the Occupy movement. Supporters of the program point to the fact that much of the money has been paid back with interest; critics argue that it failed Main Street and that, in the words of Elizabeth Warren, the money given to banks had “no strings attached, no accountability, no transparency.” The Obama campaign declined to comment when asked whether the hiring of a former bailout lobbyist undercuts Obama’s critical message on Wall Street.

Johnson is known as an extremely well-connected Democratic operative. The husband of NPR’s Michele Norris, he has been through the revolving door a few times, working variously as a Capitol Hill staffer, lobbyist and Clinton administration official. Mary Beth Cahill, campaign manager for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid, told the Hill in 2008 that in his work for that campaign Johnson possessed a “smooth and adept way of managing crises” and “knew everybody.”

In February 2009, just as the new administration was getting underway and with Johnson fresh off his stint as an informal advisor to the Obama campaign, he touted his connections with the White House in an interview with Roll Call. “We are seeing growth across the board,” he said. “Health care, energy and financial services are key issues in 2009 where we have both expertise and strong relationships on the Hill and in the new administration.”

Johnson has lobbied for a lengthy roster of large corporate clients. His work for TransCanada, the company that wants to build the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, has already been explored in the media. In the past five years, he has also worked for Shell; Verizon; Anheuser Busch; Microsoft; Comcast; the Biotechnology Industry Organization; the trade group for the cable TV industry; private prison giant the GEO Group; and the Talx Corp., which specializes in helping employers fight unemployment claims and which has been criticized for shoddy and unfair practices.

Here’s their business model: “We place highly leveraged bets, sometimes as much as 35 or 40 to 1. In return, the government implicitly agrees to bail out our banks, and if we’re fired, we’ve negotiated sweetheart deals with golden parachutes. If we bet right, then our banks keep the windfall profits and we get big bonuses. If we bet wrong, not to worry — the taxpayers will bail out our banks and the government will pay for the cost of the bailouts by cutting Social Security and Medicare. Suckers!”

While TBTF rigs pre-tax income for financial elites, American tax law rigs their after-tax income to their benefit. In the 1980s, capital gains tax rates were equal to income tax rates. But then in the 1990s Clinton and the Republican Congress lowered the capital gains rates. So billionaires who derive most of their money from their investments and savings pay taxes at a lower rate than the majority of Americans, who, like Warren Buffett’s proverbial secretary, rely on their labor income.

Andrew Mellon, who dominated American economic policymaking as treasury secretary in the 1920s during the administrations of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, was denounced by the liberal reformers of his day as the embodiment of plutocracy. But here is what he had to say about taxing capital versus wages in his 1924 book, “Taxation: The People’s Business”:

The fairness of taxing more lightly income from wages, salaries or from investments is beyond question. In the first case, the income is uncertain and limited in duration; sickness or death destroys it and old age diminishes it; in the other, the source of income continues; the income may be disposed of during a man’s life and it descends to his heirs.

Surely we can afford to make a distinction between the people whose only capital is their mental and physical energy and the people whose income is derived from investments. Such a distinction would mean much to millions of American workers and would be an added inspiration to the man who must provide a competence during his few productive years to care for himself and his family when his earnings capacity is at an end.

To which today’s conservatives, no doubt, would reply: “Andrew Mellon was a liberal!”

CEO compensation. In the last generation, American CEOs have been much better paid than their European and Asian counterparts, without having done remarkably better jobs.

American CEO compensation is rigged with perfect legality by two practices. The first is allowing the compensation of CEOs to be determined by boards of directors, whose members are frequently cronies of the CEO. Well-paid cronies, in many cases. You can be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for attending a few board meetings and rubber-stamping whatever your friend the CEO wants. When the Sarbanes-Oxley Act sought to impose more responsibility on board members, this was denounced as an assault on the foundations of free enterprise. Freebie enterprise, is more like it.

CEO compensation is also inflated by the practice of stock buy-backs. Several decades ago, the practice of rewarding CEOs with company stock options was supposed to improve the performance of their companies and of the American economy as a whole. That worked out well, didn’t it?

American companies routinely and legally drive up the prices of their stock by buying back shares in the stock market. This is the equivalent of a celebrity author buying mass quantities of his or her own book, in the hope of driving it up best-seller lists. Stock buy-backs do not strengthen the company or lead to innovation. They merely inflate the wealth of the CEO and other company employees who are paid with stock options.

Long-term shareholders might object, but they are a dying breed. Most shareholders want to maximize the price of stocks before they cash out by selling them to the proverbial “greater fool.” Thanks to buy-backs, stock options have aligned the interests of CEOs and shareholders — but at the expense of prudent, long-term investment in American companies and American industries.

Professional compensation. Bailed-out bankers and crony capitalist CEOs are not the only Americans who benefit from rigged markets for compensation. Let’s not forget the professional class, which makes up roughly 10 percent of the population (the approximate number of Americans with graduate or professional degrees).

The professions are guilds. To put it another way, they are the most powerful unions in America. They are unions for the affluent. They rig labor markets the way that guilds have always done — by preventing anybody who doesn’t belong to the guild from practicing the trade.

In most states of the Union, you can’t practice law or medicine without both passing exams and possessing a medical degree or a law degree. In the early 20th century, law was an undergraduate degree. Then law schools began requiring four-year college education as a prerequisite, in order to keep the lawyer labor market tight by weeding out Americans who can’t afford at least seven years of higher education.

While raking in rents from their credentials, America’s affluent professionals are delegating more and more of their work to poorly paid subordinates — nurses and health aides, paralegals, adjuncts. While gouging students and parents with high tuitions, today’s universities and colleges assign more and more teaching to “freeway fliers” — often graduate students paid near-poverty wages or affluent professionals who teach as a hobby. God forbid that a well-paid, tenured professor should have to teach undergraduates, instead of jetting to conferences in luxury hotels.

Note that none of these methods of rigging the market to artificially inflate incomes — TBTF, stock buy-backs that drive up stock options, the professional credentials cartel — can be blamed on capitalism or markets. There are still genuine entrepreneurs who get rich by founding companies that provide new and useful goods and services, and there are still genuine capitalists who get rich by investing in them. But getting rich the old-fashioned way by getting customers to buy what you sell is hard, compared to paying politicians to rig markets and tax policies in your favor.

Once upon a time, rigged market capitalism in America benefited the many, and not just the few. Between the 1930s, the New Deal raised the wages of working-class Americans by rigging labor markets in their favor. From the 1920s the New Dealers inherited a system of low immigration, which lasted until the 1970s and helped to create tighter labor markets at the bottom. The black Southern poor who moved North in the Great Migration benefited disproportionately when jobs were opened up for them by the cutoff of mass European immigration.

The New Deal’s minimum wage and maximum hours legislation helped millions of the working poor to join the working class or middle class. And liberal New Deal Democrats promoted unions in peace and war, with the result that by the 1950s about a third of the private sector workforce was unionized (today it is less than 7 percent).

Beginning with Ronald Reagan, the U.S. government has systematically derigged labor markets for the many while rigging compensation markets even more for the elite few. Mass immigration, including mass illegal immigration, resumed after the 1960s, lowering wages for the poorest workers and weakening the ability of unions to organize. In the late 20th century, Congress allowed inflation to erode the real value of the minimum wage. Even after several increases, it is still lower, in real terms, than it was in the 1960s. And having effectively destroyed private-sector unions, the right is now trying to eliminate public sector unions, on the theory that schoolteachers and emergency responders are a much greater threat to the American economy than the reckless bankers who created a near-Depression and the CEOs who are rewarded for offshoring one industry after another.

What is rigged can be derigged; that is the lesson of the derigging of the institutions that raised the incomes of the American middle and working classes, between the Great Depression and the 1980s. TBTF can be eliminated, either by allowing giant, interconnected financial institutions to fail, or, more realistically, by turning them into tightly regulated public utilities that don’t make risky bets. CEO compensation practices can be reformed by law. Corporations are creations of the governments that charter them, and charters can contain any rules that lawmakers choose to put into them. And the rents extracted by the academic-professional complex can be reduced, by lowering the barriers to entry to the professions or, more radically, by reorganizing medicine, law and university teaching so that they are no longer structured as trades run by medieval guilds.

Of course, to succeed, this agenda has to be promoted by politicians, many of whom are members of the credentialed professional guilds, dependent on campaign donations from financial and corporate elites whose compensation depends to a large degree on markets that are legally rigged.

Deutsche Bank, which is based in Germany, received nearly $12 billion in taxpayer bailout money as part of the rescue loan made to insurer AIG in 2008.

Like Zuccotti Park, the atrium at 60 Wall Street is what’s known as a privately owned public space. These are sometimes referred to as “bonus plazas” because generally developers receive a zoning benefit — like an allowance for building extra floors — in exchange for maintaining a public space.

In a so-called sale-leaseback deal in 2007, Deutsche Bank sold 60 Wall Street for $1.2 billion to Paramount Group, a large New York-based private real estate firm. Deutsche’s North American headquarters remain in the 47-floor building on a long-term lease. Deutsche had purchased the building in 2001 from J.P. Morgan, the firm for which the tower was constructed in 1989.

To understand the importance of 60 Wall Street, consider the calendar of daily Occupy meetings. Events at 60 Wall Street on Wednesday alone include a people of color group meeting, a vision and goals group meeting, an introduction to direct democracy and facilitation training, an arts & culture group meeting, and a meeting of the “Queering OWS” group.

During a visit Wednesday afternoon, at least three Occupy working groups were meeting clustered around tables on the atrium’s west side, mixed in with bankers on their lunch breaks. One was the mobile occupation group, which is hatching plans for a collaborative bus tour to various Occupy sites around the country.

“It’s a great space,” says John Paul Learn, a 32-year-old Staten Islander who says the mobile group has been meeting at 60 Wall Street three times a week. He points out another big plus: free Wi-Fi, which is lacking at Zuccotti.

Asked about Occupy’s use of the space, Deutsche spokesman Duncan King said, “The atrium is a public space open to everyone who abides by the rules.” He said there had been no problems with the occupiers so far, but declined to comment further, including on the company’s view of the protests.

Those rules, by the way, are posted at 60 Wall Street as: “No Loitering; Loud Boisterous Behavior Prohibited; No Excessive Use of Space; Pedestrian Ingress and Egress to Remain Clear; Leave/Erect Movable Property Law in Effect.” One day when I was there last week a guard told protesters that they could not move tables and chairs; but another security guard told me Wednesday there had been no serious problems with protesters. NYPD officers are also typically posted in the atrium.

I’ve heard speculation from occupiers that the movement’s presence at 60 Wall Street may expand in the winter months, as the need for a heated space becomes more urgent. It’s conveniently located just five blocks from Zuccotti Park. It’s not, however, an alternate sleeping place. It closes between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. each night (though the small arcade outside the atrium is open 24 hours a day and offers at least a bit of shelter).

And the occupiers recognize that they are still operating with constraints that come with the precarious status of public-private spaces.

“If you don’t have the real estate, you can’t have the culture or the politics,” says Bill Dobbs, a member of Occupy’s press team.

“It’s temporal,” he says of 60 Wall Street. “It’s under the owner’s security and surveillance. It’s also up against space limits. It’s a very ad hoc arrangement.”

Great challenges face us — on climate change, energy, healthcare, the economy — but Washington has proven itself incapable of coping with any of them. An entire generation of voters who believed President Barack Obama’s election would usher in a new era has every right to be disappointed and disillusioned: Gridlock has never seemed so entrenched.

But even as our sense of powerlessness at the impotence of Washington and the resurgence of Wall Street feeds anger and despair, fueling grass-roots insurgencies on both the right and the left, beneath the surface a paradox lurks: As individuals, we’ve never been so empowered to make change on our own, to network and organize with like-minded individuals and to put our own money to work for our own dreams. The ascendance of the Internet, combined with the rise of social networks and the ubiquity of smartphones, has opened up a new frontier where the old rules of Washington and Wall Street don’t necessarily apply. Our present challenge is to figure out how to occupy this new frontier, to stop looking to Washington for answers, and start learning what we can do on our own.

We’ve seen this coming for a long time. The Internet fundamentally disrupted the mainstream media’s gatekeeping influence over news and information. The ease with which data can be copied and distributed drastically upended long-standing entertainment industry models. Digital campaign fundraising has proven extraordinarily powerful, allowing candidates to tap huge sums through the amalgamation of small contributions from millions of people.

But we’re only just beginning to understand the ramifications of our point, click and copy world — and some of the biggest Titans have yet to fall.

Here’s looking at you, Wall Street. If we apply the new power of social media networks and digital computing to the world of finance, we can retake control of our own money and reinvigorate our local communities. The day is not far off when we can wave our smartphone at the local business storefront of our choice and start steering investment capital directly to it. Since Washington cannot rein in the runaway power of the financial sector, we’re going to have to do it ourselves.

The first step is obvious: taking our savings out of the big banks and putting them into smaller, independent institutions. If the Occupy Wall Street movement has achieved anything, it has most certainly breathed new life into the two-year-old “Move Your Money” campaign, as well as spawned numerous imitators. Nov. 5′s “Bank Transfer Day” will be a major test of the power of anti-Wall Street sentiment. We already know that consumer opinion can change the operating behavior of even the mightiest financial institutions. The abrupt decision by nearly all the biggest banks to bow to public outcry and withdraw plans to impose new fees for debit card use offers us just one recent, potent example.

It is simple enough to find a highly rated local bank or credit union in your own community and there is nothing inherently difficult about getting your money out of a Chase or Bank of America, but the overall process is also not quite as carefree as some parties like to suggest. Switching over online bill-paying and changing your direct deposit and direct withdrawal arrangements can be a hassle. It’s a mess that calls out for “one-click” disintermediation — it should be as easy to switch banks as it is to take your phone number from one carrier to another. Legislation has been proposed that would accelerate the process, but right now we’re still in the banking dark ages.

But just moving your money from one bank to another, while symbolically important, is still only a tiptoe dip into the new sea of possibility. A far more important step is to do something interesting with that money — to make your money work for your values. Wall Street won’t lend out the trillions of cash it’s sitting on, so we’re going to have to do it ourselves.

Ever since the San Francisco start-up Kiva began facilitating the donations of small sums of money to struggling entrepreneurs in countries all over the world, the notion of peer-to-peer lending or “crowd-funding” has attracted increasing attention and hype. So-called peer-to-peer lending or crowd-funding is a classic way to leverage the power of the Internet — as easy to master and participate in as your run-of-the-mill online dating site. You’ve got transparency: You decide whom you want to help, and you can track the progress of your cash. You can leverage your social networks. Instead of inviting your Facebook friends to a party, you can invite them to an organic farm virtual barn-raising. There is point-and-click ease of use — just a few twitches of your mouse, and your money has suddenly been transferred from your credit card or bank account to a seamstress in Djibouti or solar-power start-up in Fresno. Kiva’s example has been accompanied by scores of others in the U.S. alone: Prosper.com, the Lending Club, Indie GoGo,, Microplace and Kickstarter are some of the most famous.

In the process, the focus has shifted from the dramatic power of globe-spanning connections between the developed and developing world to the potential for encouraging development in one’s own community — what author Amy Cortese has dubbed “locavesting” — with a tip of the hat to the food and farming activists who have championed sustainable, locally focused agriculture. Just as Internet-enabled campaign fundraising facilitated the aggregation of millions of dollars into the coffers of politicians like Barack Obama and Ron Paul and Herman Cain, so too can small flows of cash from ordinary citizens be aggregated in support of the entrepreneurial efforts of other ordinary citizens. Maybe you’d like to steer your funds toward public transportation-friendly urban renewal instead of a faceless office park in the suburbs, or help a local farm with its expansion plans instead of fueling some giant grocery store chain’s metastasizing growth. You can do it.

There have been some bumps in the roads, but the peer-to-peer lending world is growing quickly, says Cortese.

“When social networking meets finance, it make it easier for companies to reach out to their supporters,” says Cortese, who also credits the slow economy, the jobs crisis and “public dissatisfaction with Wall Street and government” as factors that are fueling interest in crowd-funding.

The bandwagon is growing. On Nov. 1, Starbucks launched a massive crowd-funding project in collaboration with a network of community-lending institutions to steer cash to community businesses. Kiva is using some of those same institutions — technically referred to as Community Development Financial Institutions — to vet targets for donations from its donors.

One of the great attractions of crowd-funding is that local investors tend to operate according to values that go beyond mere maximization of the rate of return. As we saw so clearly in the run-up to the financial crisis, global capital doesn’t care a whit about local conditions. It just wants to move cash in and out as quickly as possible while accumulating the highest payback. If the fastest way to generate a profit is to build a bunch of McMansions and finance their sale with dodgy mortgages that get securitized and flipped to the next speculator, so be it. Never mind what that kind of development means for the environment or the local culture or whether the homeowners who move in can actually afford such monstrosities.

But when we start looking around at what we might want to invest in, in our own hometowns, we may think a little differently; we’ll accept lower returns over longer periods, in exchange for a more vibrant downtown or the nurturing of independently operated businesses. We’ll valorize quality over hit-and-run greed.

There are encouraging signs as to how the increased access to information enabled by the Internet and smartphones is already helping break down the influence of big corporations on our consumption habits. A recently published study on the impact of online consumer reviews by Harvard Business School researcher Michael Luca delivers a nugget of information with breathtaking implications. Luca looked at recommendation aggregators like Yelp and concluded that online consumer reviews increased the profitability of independent restaurants while decreasing the relative share of revenue enjoyed by chain restaurants.

It’s easy to see how this works. Picture yourself in a strange town, looking for a place to eat. You pull out your GPS-enabled smartphone and check for highly rated local restaurants. Given the choice, an independent eatery with great reviews is always going to win out over the Olive Garden. As consumers, we crave authenticity and lust after worthwhile options. We want to support Mom and Pop, if we know that their enchiladas are going to be killer.

The same principle can work for investment. Ian Galloway, a senior associate specializing in community development at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, envisions a compelling future.

“I can imagine a world not too far down the road,” says Galloway, “where you can walk down the street and pass a blighted piece of property, take a photo of it with your smartphone, click your CDFI [Community Development Financial Institution] app and have that photo geo-coded and sent to the local CDFI with your 25-dollar investment in the predevelopment loan that would cause that property to be redeveloped.”

However, there is still one big roadblock obstructing that future, warn both Galloway and Cortese. As currently constituted, the regulatory environment doesn’t make it easy for peer-to-peer lending to flourish. If you promise investors a return on their investment, federal law regards that loan as a “security” and that triggers an avalanche of legal and fiduciary hoops to jump through. Getting into compliance with federal and state law can be a very expensive proposition, as both Prosper and the Lending Club, which do offer a return on investment, have discovered.

But if you don’t promise a return on your investment, you’re asking for charity. So far, the charity model has worked for Kiva and Kickstarter, but there are obviously limitations to how far that can scale up. We’re not going to break Wall Street’s power over the American economy by encouraging charitable donations. There needs to be a market incentive.

The laws date back to New Deal regulations aimed at protecting ordinary investors from unscrupulous market players. They have their place, but they probably need to be tweaked to fit the Internet era. The power imbalances that used to skew the relationship between a small investor and a company seeking investment are ameliorated by the transparency facilitated by the Internet. And when a bunch of people are trying to invest small sums of money in a local business, it’s not at all clear that they need a high level of protection.

The result of the current regulatory framework, says Cortese, “is a terrible injustice.”

“If you are a wealthy individual you can invest in anything you want — private companies, hedge funds, venture capital. But the large majority of Americans are basically relegated to public companies and bonds.”

Crowd-funding won’t take off, says Cortese, unless restrictions on earning a return from peer-to-peer lending investments are lifted.

Which leads us, unfortunately, back to where we started. The fact that the future of peer-to-peer lending and the democratization of finance may depend on congressional action on the regulatory environment is an invitation to slip right back into the same black pit of despair that has inspired so many Americans to seek ways to outflank Washington and Wall Street. If Washington is broken, how will we ever be able to move forward.

But all may not be lost. In this particular case, there might actually be some room for bipartisan agreement. President Obama proposed a relaxation of the rules that would cover crowd-funding in the American Jobs Act. That package failed to get out of the Senate, but a measure specifically focused on crowd-funding has been introduced in the House by a conservative Republican, and may be up for a vote as early as next week.

Whether the Senate will follow the House’s lead, should the bill pass, is, of course, uncertain. Which means, after all, that Americans still can’t completely turn their backs on Washington. Even as we move our money, and look for better places to invest our money, we can’t let up our pressure on our representatives in Congress, no matter how incapable of doing their jobs they appear to be. We need to get our new rules for our new economy, so we can use our smartphones and social networks to change the world, as we see fit.

Some people have tried to step back from those demands already made and coded as “liberal” in order to find some sort of great middle ground. Matt Langer proposed two simple demands that focus on “process,” and not “politics”: Publicly financed elections and the elimination of paid lobbying. Noble causes, but only indirectly related to the economic injustices being highlighted and protested. (And “paid lobbying” means not just big money industry groups, but also labor, environmental and civil rights groups, and low-income advocacy organizations.)

We are probably not ever going to see the wholesale nationalization or forcible breaking up of the world’s mega-banks, and whatever strict regulations we place on their actions will be weakened by future Congresses or faulty regulators.

The solution, if I may take a page from the official Washington Grown-Ups’ Handbook, is tackling the national debt. Not the federal debt, though. The people’s debt.

Household debt is at 90 percent of GDP. Any stimulus proposal — even “dropping money from helicopters” — would result in a massive transfer of money from indebted Americans to cash-engorged banks, rather than the spending spree that would theoretically put us back to work.

The original progressive movement kicked off when a bunch of very indebted people got pissed off at Wall Street. Those populists were largely farmers (and they hated the gold standard, which artificially limited the money supply) but today Americans of all stripes and occupations and backgrounds are swimming in debt of all kinds — most of it owed to hugely profitable financial institutions that are, on the whole, better off than most of us.

The big fix then was bimetallism, leading to inflation. Inflation would probably be helpful now. But a “MORE INFLATION” demand will probably not inspire a a mass movement, especially those on a fixed income. It doesn’t help that we’ve been trained for years to consider “inflation” a great, unmitigated evil.

So my immodest proposal is simply this: Individuals and households in the bottom 99 percent who owe debt to any large financial institution that received federal government support during and after the 2008 crisis should see their debt forgiven. That would certainly stimulate the economy, as most people would suddenly find themselves with a great deal more money to spend on iPads (and food, and clothing, and housing, and healthcare). The debt can be forgiven by decree or if the government really wants to it can step in to pay it itself; I don’t much care either way. (Though it’d be nice to see it just wiped off the books, to enrage the banks.)

Let’s wipe the debt of the 99 percent off the books, tell the financial sector to eat it, and get on with our lives.

I’m by no means the first person to come up with this demand. David Graeber, author of “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” proposed the idea on “Democracy Now” last month.

Even some economists have begun calling for mass debt relief. I think it’s perfectly suited to both the Occupy Wall Street demonstration and the “We Are the 99 Percent” movement that’s arisen from it.

Debt forgiveness has the primary benefit of uniting the members of “the 99 percent” who have been mocked by the elite press for being young college graduates (it’s their own fault, we’re told, for not getting business degrees or going into Wall Street themselves!) with the shrinking middle class and struggling lower classes who may have never participated in a protest in their lives, but who are largely furious with the state of the nation and the influence of the rich on the government. The “Tea Parties” may have been a conservative movement-sponsored right-wing phenomenon, but when the Tea Parties polled well for a time it was simply because plenty of non-right wing people were pissed that banks were “bailed out” and regular people weren’t. So let’s get on with this long overdue bailout.

A demand for mass debt forgiveness for 99 percenters is simple enough to explain in a sound bite and radical enough to appeal to the majority of Occupy Wall Street participants, from the anarchists to the liberal arts school graduates to the union workers to even the drum circle drummers. If the demand picked up mass popular support (and why wouldn’t it?) to the point that that radical-sounding idea became less radical-sounding, then the movement will have accomplished more than simply shutting up and voting would have on its own. (The conservative movement didn’t reorient the modern Republican Party by politely voting for whatever Republican had the best shot at winning any given election, after all.)

The problem with the proposal — basically “moral hazard” — is precisely the problem with the government’s de facto policy of not allowing the financial industry to collapse under the weight of its colossal greed. If you believe Americans should be taught “the hard way” not to live “beyond their means,” forcing credit card companies to take a haircut on the money they’re owed would certainly lead them to limit consumer debt-spending in the future. Banks would rather receive regular payments from fixed-rate mortgages than trick people into ARMs if they thought the government was likely to step in on behalf of borrowers rather than lenders. In other words, forcing the financial sector to feel the pain of the rest of us would help align our interests. It would no longer be profitable to rip us off if the government stepped in to halt the Great Rip-Off.

I don’t pretend to speak for Occupy Wall Street. This is simply my suggestion. But if the elites want a demand, I say give ‘em a demand.