With direct deposit and online banking available no matter where you put your money, there’s simply no reason to keep supporting Wall Street financial institutions.

As an internally displaced person resulting from institutionalized and culturally sanctioned greed, I find it difficult to accept that millions like myself within the United States have no alternative. Knowing that for the rest of our lives we will have to fight just to survive makes me all the more determined to oppose those who have caused this humanitarian tragedy.

Displacement, initially geographical, soon becomes social, leaving us outside the mainstream, and given the American propensity to blame the victim, over time becomes a stigma. In the ambience of austerity, this means those ostracized for not conforming to the brutal reality of market-oriented morality become brutalized. How they will respond to this cruelty depends on how they perceive themselves and their environment; given the misanthropic attitude of America’s rulers, our resentment, if mobilized effectively, could generate either social reform or civil war. For now, it’s too soon to tell.

Subjugating public institutions to market tyranny, however, involves more than just greed and the misery it ensures. Pitting the poor against each other as they grovel for life’s basic necessities also mobilizes resentment against any group perceived as benefiting from the public good.

While we’ve witnessed this dynamic in operation since Reagan glorified greed as a national virtue, its institutionalization under the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations has helped to propel bigotry as well. Eliminating social services for immigrants, jailing blacks, and terminating the sovereignty of indigenous nations are some of the most visible agenda items of this bigotry.

As popular resentment against the federal government is mobilized concurrent with the implementation of privatization, outbreaks of vigilante violence encouraged by state and market interests is a given. How we respond to this coming crisis will determine whether the crisis becomes an epidemic.

The research, education, and organizing we do in advance makes all the difference in what type of community action we can expect.

As a method of preventing free and open inquiry,  suppressing democratic dissent and punishing good faith participation in developing public policy is accomplished mostly without the aid of police. Instead, the mobilization of malcontents and use of vigilantes as a political pressure group are much more effective. In combination, the noise they are able to create through symbiotic media enables them to shout or scare the sensible out of the public arena. When the kind and caring are thus removed, governments and corporations founded on dominance and theft are free to pursue further acts of destruction.

In today’s world of globalized markets and militaries, this arrangement between elitists and opportunists not only plays to fear and greed, but also mainstreams suicidal schemes supported by religious hysteria. The fact that the spear-carriers — be they militias or millenarians — are oblivious to the manipulation of their fears to hate and seek revenge against opponents of oligarchy, does little to diminish the horrible impact they have. Once they have committed to this mission of madness, no crime against humanity or act of natural despoliation is too great; genocide and ecocide do not deter them.