What would it take to get Americans off their couches and into the streets?

The Arab Street — a slangy term for popular opinion and activism in that part of the world — is brimming with energy and resolve, it is, as they say, kicking ass and taking names in this amazing Arab spring. The American Street is empty, and it is still winter there.

These thoughts are occasioned by last night’s story on CBS’s 60 Minutes detailing the enormous sweat shops created to forge signatures on bogus documents for the country’s largest banks. In their zeal to rake in money quickly from the securitized, sub-prime mortgage frenzy that destroyed much of the financial world, the banks paid little attention to the legalities of dealing in real estate. Years later, after the bubble that they had blown up had burst, and the recession they had caused had decimated the middle class, those who got caught holding the mortgages when the music stopped found they had a problem. They couldn’t foreclose on a property they couldn’t prove they owned because they had been too cavalier to do the paperwork. So they simply started manufacturing bogus paperwork. Hundreds of thousands of Americans, all of whom have no doubt been sorely penalized by banks for missing a payment by a day or overdrawing an account by a dollar, have been put out of their homes by companies that had no evidence that they owned the mortgages.

Where is the outrage? Where are the street demonstrations, the burnings in effigy? Where are the platoons of bankers being perp-walked to prison? The street is empty. (read more)