There was a telling moment in last night’s Nevada Senate debate in which Sharron Angle and Harry Reid explained how they view the proper role of government and its relationship with corporate America. And their answers must have made the nation’s largest corporations smile.

Chris Matthews’s Hardball featured a segment where Willie Brown, Joan Walsh, and Chris commented on the Brown/Whitman and Blumenthal/McMahon contests for the US Senate in CA and CT. After watching an exchange between the two CT candidates. Chris shook his head in wonderment and in the midst of some contemptuous chuckles said:

Mis-ter Banks-ter, Where’s The Note? (Harlem stride style, with feeling)

An extended metaphor: Mortgages as meat, and banks & mortgage lenders as sausage makers.

Trust me — it makes sense!

The anger against the banksters is global in nature, and it’s an anger that both progressives and teabaggers share in common. Impotent rage at banksters taking advantage of the people without recourse will be not be impotent long; it will bubble over and foment into real ugliness. Will U.S. politicians and party leadership catch a clue about this anger?

Reagan announced the robbery but couldn’t pull it off. Clinton robbed us blind. Bush Jr. and Obama drove the get-away car, with Obama disguised as a security guard.

With unemployment so high and middle class job prospects so low, this Labor Day is overcast by gloom. We can surrender to it. We can rant with Glenn Beck and kick the dog. Alternatively, we can join with our neighbors, employed and unemployed, our foreclosed-on children, our elderly parents and together create a grassroots groundswell that gives government no choice but to respond to our needs, the needs of working people.

Fox News’ Glenn Beck, assuming the role of 21st Century Marie Antoinette, leads a pack of royalist Republicans who have spent the summer mocking, vilifying and denigrating the nation’s 14.5 million unemployed workers. It is the moneyed class smacking down the working class in an attempt to disempower and disenfranchise them. But the unemployed are mad as hell and aren’t taking it any more. The Union of the Unemployed and Working America are organizing the jobless to vote this fall and to demand help from lawmakers. They’re not out to behead Beck and the royalist Republicans, just dethrone them.

There are distinct, non-squishy, promises that Candidate Obama made over and over, which President Obama has utterly failed to act on.

Since the mid-90’s, American banks’ profitability has been upwards of 75% fee-based, not based on interest income.