Call me paranoid: what's at issue in 2012

Last night I watched "Inside Job," the Oscar-winning documentary about the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession.
http://www.sonyclassics.com/insidejob/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_(film)

Before you dismiss this blog, see the film.

2012: Democrats v. Republicans ?

Or do the sides look something like this?

On the one side:

1. the Financial Industry
http://www.economist.com/node/14416804

2. the Federal Government
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/story/2011-11-15/congress-wealthy-1/51216626/1

3. Multi-national corporations

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/general-electric-paid-federal-taxes-2010/story?id=13224558#.TtDirGC0xT4

4. Elite universities

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers

5. Mega Law Firms

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/globalbusiness/8624051/Worlds-largest-law-firms-profits-rise.html

6. Multi-national Private Security Firms

http://www.thenation.com/article/blackwater-founder-implicated-murder

On the other:

1. Higher Education below the "elite" level

http://www.highereducation.org/about/about.shtml

2. Organized Labor

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/02/28/is-organized-labor-obsolete.html

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/o/organized_labor/index.html

3. The Blogosphere

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogosphere

4. The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street

Yes, I list them together. If the federal government and Wall Street form a seamless web (the thesis of "Inside Job"), then the Tea Party's demand for less central government and OWS's demands directed at Wall Street are of a piece... if only the two sides will see that.

http://teapartypatriots.ning.com/

http://occupywallst.org/

5. Lawyers, below the multi-national mega-firms
http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/thurlr22&div=7&id=&page=

6. State and Local Government

Yes, where the five categories immediately above still have the resources to amass countervailing power... where it's even possible to launch and sustain viable third-party movements.

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/07/sachs-america-needs-a-third-party-movement.html