Washington Post

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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Jordan Yospe has a job you couldn't make up. He is, according to a report in Monday's New York Times, a Los Angeles attorney who works with screenwriters and producers to place name-brand products in movies.

As the cost of filmmaking continues to rise, "product placement" has become a serious source of production funding. The more a product is shown or used in a movie, the Times reports, "the more a brand pays for the appearance, offering fees ranging from a few hundred thousand dollars to several million a film."

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I don't mean to sound nostalgic for the Cold War, but we've got to stop conducting ourselves as if nobody is looking.

When she spoke from the floor of the House on Sunday in support of the healthcare reform bill, the word she wielded was "opportunity." Her point -- that the bill would enable Americans to leave their jobs to start up new ventures without fear of not being able to get health insurance in their new gig -- was altogether valid and perfectly good, but she insisted on repeating the word "opportunity" so many times that she left listeners (this listener, anyway) a little woozy.

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With the enactment of health-care reform, the often hapless, sometimes hopeless Democrats have transformed themselves into something America has not seen in decades: a governing party. By passing the most significant social legislation since the '60s, they have ended the policy gridlock dating to the middle of Ronald Reagan's presidency. They have revalidated the almost quaint notion that -- despite the ever greater role of money in politics -- elections have consequences, too.

This revival was partly the result of the Democrats' decision to activate their base. Obama for America -- the 13 million-member organization of the president's supporters -- was put to sleep after Barack Obama's election. But in recent weeks it was awakened and enlisted in a massive effort to lobby wavering lawmakers. Its members sent a million text messages and made half a million phone calls to fence-sitting Democrats during the 10 days preceding the House votes on Sunday. Unions and other organizations that were already pressuring Democratic lawmakers to support the legislation intensified their efforts.

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