I know the Occupy Wall Street movement is taking credit for Bank of America backing down on their debit card fee, but couldn't you also argue that this is precisely how a free market is supposed to work?

The defense, I suppose, is that Wall Street typically doesn't operate in an actual "free" market -- they've typically been able to do things just like this with impunity and casual disregard for their customers. So if Occupy Wall Street really wants to frame this right, it's a victory for free market capitalism, not the oligarchic bullshit we have had to put up with. Much better optics, in my opinion.

(As an aside, and in the "why do I write this when nobody reads it" department, my initial reaction was the free market part, but only in writing the post did I come around to the "and that's really the point" part of it. Yay process!)

Last week, Brad Plumer flagged an article on Mitt Romney and his Bain Capital years, describing the change in the management consulting industry as "the shareholder value revolution."

If anyone knows of any good books describing that "shareholder value revolution" in more detail, I'd love to hear about them. I have a prevailing theory that the shift from responsibility to one's customers to one's shareholders is a huge part of the increased income inequality since the 1980s. My theory is that this broke Adam Smith's "invisible hand," effectively decoupling the good of the business community with the good of society at large.

I just don't know whether or not there was a precipitating event. My guess is the introduction of 401K retirement plans, which I also guess injected a lot of other people's money into the stock market.

Again, all just guesses. But something happened at the beginning of the 80s that gave rise to companies like Bain and McKinsey, and I'm really curious as to what it was.

Frank Bruni has an op-ed in the New York Times where he's very distressed about "disconnect between the seriousness of our angst and the silliness of our politics," but then seems to downplay this bit at the end:

Some observers say that the absurdity of that is indeed a mirror of our distress — that Americans are grasping at simplistic straws. But Cain’s support won’t last or turn out to have been all that meaningful. The poll’s more consequential findings were that 6 in 10 Republican primary voters weren’t paying close attention yet and 8 in 10 said it was too early to decide on a candidate.

So, yeah, isn't that it in a nutshell right there? The only people paying attention now are the political pundit class and the true believers, who have given themselves a sense of inflated self-importance -- remember all those stories about how the GOP field hadn't sorted itself out two years before the election? -- that allows them to define the playing field and the narrative for when everybody else starts paying attention at some point when it actually matters.

I don't have a problem with true believers getting involved to help shape their side's vision. That's more of a feature than a bug in this little exercise. But I feel like the always-on, ultra-competitive media culture has managed to tease out all of the bad parts of that process by focusing on the bullshit over actual substance because actual complexity and debate doesn't get ratings.

Of course, there's no easy solution. For-profit news organizations are going to put the "for-profit" part first, damn the consequences. You can't really get this horse back in the barn. All you can do is all you could ever do, and that's try like hell to make the people around you think about what they're told instead of just believing someone because a talking head on television or a columnist on a website who doesn't have your best interests at heart told you to.

(Yes, I get that this means you shouldn't just take what I say at face value, either. I'd encourage you not to.)