David Sirota writes: By all measures, those of us Americans not in the top 1 percent of income earners are under enormous economic pressure and most of us feel powerless to influence those who act in our name. Public attitudes toward Washington are reaching record levels of animosity. A Scripps Howard News Service poll in 2006 found a majority of Americans saying they “personally are more angry” at the government than they used to be. And there’s a growing backlash against the hostile takeover of our government by Big Money interests.

It’s the natural reaction from a country that is watching its pocket get picked. Wages are stagnating, health-care costs are skyrocketing, pensions are being looted, personal debt climbs—all as corporate profits keep rising, politicians pass more tax breaks for the superwealthy, and CEOs pay themselves tens of millions of dollars a year.

“There’s class warfare, all right,” billionaire Warren Buffet recently told the New York Times. “It’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

But that may not be true for much longer. …

In a year of travel to report for my new book, The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington,
I found those who are fighting back: shareholders running resolutions
against corporate boards, third parties shattering the two-party
duopoly, legislators kicking down lobbyists in state capitals, bloggers
orchestrating primary challenges to entrenched lawmakers, or—on the
darker side—armed, enraged suburbanites forming vigilante bands at our
southern border. What connects these disparate uprisings is both the
sense that America is out of control, and an anger at the government
for creating the crises we now face.

In Helena,
Montana, I watched Kirk Hammerquist testify before the state
legislature in opposition to a tax measure designed to give more breaks
to wealthy, out-of-state property owners. Hammerquist owns a
construction company in Kalispell, and has got the whole cowboy look
going—jeans, boots, and a mustache.

“I was
driving down last night on an ice skating rink,” he says, recounting
his journey through the snowstorm that just hit. “And I said, ‘why the
heck am I doing this?’

“This state is really
becoming a playground of the wealthy—we know it, we can’t deny it,” he
says. “And don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against wealthy
people—I’m trying my hardest to be one. Ö But to sit there and work on
a three- to five-million-dollar home for an owner that is going to be
there for a couple of months in the summer Ö and to think the guy
that’s working with me [putting] all this pride and sweat into that
house is going to get less [of a tax refund] than that person who is
going to come play here for a few months—I tell ya, it made me drive
all night. I speak for a lot of people, the guys that work with their
hands. I had to come down and represent them.” (09/14/08)
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