Washington Post

May has been a month of deregulatory debacle, of machines running out of control in the Wall Street meltdown and the Gulf oil spill, both of which could have been averted by some prudent rule-making. Such massive mishaps were prefigured, in a sense, by the Doomsday Machine -- the Soviet device, in the concluding scene of "Dr. Strangelove," that reduces the world to a cinder. Designed to automatically detonate so many atomic bombs if just one nuclear weapon is fired at the U.S.S.R. that it would deter any foe from dropping the big one, it works perfectly, with one small hitch: A U.S. B-52 drops the bomb on Russia before Americans learn of its existence, and mere humans are powerless to intervene as it blows up the planet.

Last week Wall Street stumbled upon its very own Doomsday Machine: computers programmed to go into automatic selling mode when a share price plunges unexpectedly. When the prices of several stocks declined Thursday, the New York Stock Exchange suspended trading in those stocks. But they continued to plunge on multiple other exchanges. Within seconds, stocks everywhere were tanking; within 15 minutes, the Dow Jones industrial average had dropped a thousand points.

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One of the precious few points of consensus in our polarized land is that we need to do a better job educating our kids. But consensus, apparently, gets you only so far. In red states and blue, in urban, suburban and rural districts with unionized and non-unionized teachers, the story is the same: The worst recession since the 1930s is clobbering the nation's schools.

In Indiana and Arizona, the legislatures have eliminated free all-day kindergarten. In Kansas, some school districts have gone to four-day weeks. In New Jersey, 60 percent of school districts are reducing their course offerings. In Albuquerque, the number of school district employees is down 10 percent. In the D.C. suburbs, Maryland's Prince George's and Virginia's Prince William counties have increased their class sizes.

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"A truck driver is a truck driver is a truck driver," says Teamster official Ken Hall. And while this might seem a Gertrude Stein version of a Teamster truism, Hall's assertion is at the heart of both a major labor dispute and a bill about to be ping-ponged between the House and Senate.

The truckers in question work for FedEx and, alone among truckers employed by delivery services, come under the jurisdiction of the Railway Labor Act, which governs airline and rail companies. Under the RLA, their prospects for organizing are roughly comparable to those of the Mormon Church under Stalin.

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Finally, there's a Tea Party for the rest of us.

Starting Tuesday, large numbers of irate Americans will channel their ire at the parties that are actually responsible for our economic crisis: the big banks. On that day, a coalition of union, clergy and community groups are set to demonstrate in San Francisco outside Wells Fargo's annual shareholder meeting. The next day, a similar demonstration is slated to unfold at Bank of America's shareholder meeting in Charlotte. And the day after that, the AFL-CIO plans to lead the largest such demonstration into the belly of the beast -- Wall Street. Further protests are planned for Wall Street's lobbyist row -- Washington's K Street -- in May.

"We're trying to create a which-side-are-you-on moment for Congress," George Goehl, executive director of National People's Action, a group that has long labored to rein in predatory lending, told me a week ago, just hours before the Securities and Exchange Commission filed suit against Goldman Sachs -- the moment when it became exquisitely awkward for members of Congress to come down on the banks' side.

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"The special gift of this union has been its ability to do things differently," Andy Stern told me on Tuesday as he looked back on his 14-year tenure as president of the Service Employees International Union in the wake of his reported decision to resign, which shocked Washington after it leaked out Monday.

Stern's resignation could be Exhibit A in the SEIU's Doing Things Differently file. It comes at the height of his power, not just as the leader of America's most dynamic union but also as the leader of liberalism's most effective political organization; one with the best access to President Obama and that has done more than any other to build a nationwide progressive infrastructure over the past couple of decades.

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The Goldman Sachs scandal has done the unthinkable: It's made it possible that legislation reining in Wall Street's casino may actually be enacted.

The odds against real reform are still steep. Wall Street remains the most deep-pocketed lobby in the land. And the problem isn't just Republican opposition. "A lot of our members up here just want a bill passed," says one Democratic legislator. "They don't think that people are watching that closely. But this matters immensely to people. This is a which-side-are-you-on moment."

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