Naming the Enemy

Capitolism

By Christopher Hayes

June 3, 2009

Every spring National People's Action brings hundreds of community organizers and grassroots leaders from across the country to Washington for its annual conference. And every year the event culminates in a hotly anticipated and meticulously planned direct action. In 2004 organizers bused hundreds of people to Karl Rove's Georgetown home, where they demanded he use his power to push Congress to pass the DREAM Act, which would allow undocumented students to qualify for financial aid. George Goehl, who runs NPA, wasn't on staff at the time, but he describes the logic this way: "Rove was the most powerful person in the administration there was a way to get access to."

This year NPA opted to target someone you've almost certainly never heard of: Ed Yingling, president and CEO of the American Bankers Association. The ABA has been the chief obstacle to a proposed bankruptcy reform bill that would let judges modify mortgages, thereby allowing an estimated 600,000 people who face foreclosure to stay in their homes. The opposition from the banking lobby has been so fierce that the Senate's chief proponent of the bill, Dick Durbin, more or less gave up on negotiating with his colleagues across the aisle, opting instead to negotiate directly with representatives of the banks, as if they were some heretofore undiscovered fourth branch of government. (In April the bill went down to defeat, prompting Durbin to observe that the banks "frankly, own the place.")

"It was 600 people," says Goehl, describing the ABA action. "We had twelve or thirteen buses.... [We] went to the seventh floor where Ed Yingling is.... [And we said,] 'You guys have created the foreclosure crisis, sent the economy down the tubes and now you're preventing the number-one piece of legislation that would keep families in their home. You gotta back off.'"