Rigged Game

Posting on today's Huffington Post, former secretary of labor in the Clinton administration and current Berkeley professor of public policy Robert Reich observes that the "disconnect between Washington and the rest of the nation hasn't been this wide since the late 1960s." After his recent visit with Occupy Oakland protestors, Reich came away convinced that the fledgling Occupier movement in the United States "cannot be stopped. Here, as elsewhere, people are outraged at what feels like a rigged game -- an economy that won't respond, a democracy that won't listen, and a financial sector that holds all the cards."

Reich foresees a collision, perhaps as soon as next year, between the "Americans who are losing their jobs or their pay and can't pay their bills" and the "Washington insiders, deficit hawks, regressive Republicans, diffident Democrats, well-coiffed lobbyists, and the lobbyists' wealthy patrons on Wall Street who haven't a clue or couldn't care less."