Matt Taibbi defends populist anger at the banks, and notes that more anger may be a good thing. He is correct that there really has been no punishment leveled virtually any time the financial industry has collapsed or screwed customers. More of the larger institutions, who took the greatest risk and put the world economy at great risk and spent and continue to spend very large amounts on lobbying, should face enormously tightened regulation.

As for the credit card companies, fuck them. The biggest of them are engaged in one of the all-time great scams right now, gorging themselves on cheap money lent to them by the Fed or the government via bailout programs and then turning right around and further widening their spread by increasing prices to the ordinary consumer. Imagine an oil company that got to buy government crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve at a discount during the Katrina crisis and then turned around and gouged consumers during the shortage. Think there would be public anger then? Maybe. This is close to the same thing, and let’s not forget who these motherfuckers are: they are the people who spent most of the last decade and a half showering congressmen with cash in order to get the Bankruptcy Bill passed. That bill made it significantly harder for people to declare bankruptcy to get out from credit card debt so that they could keep their homes. A study by the New York Federal Reserve last year concluded that there are roughly 32,000 more foreclosures per month because of this bill than there would have been had the old bankruptcy laws remained in place. The study estimated that the bill resulted in about 400,000 additional foreclosures total since its inception.