Our veterans fight for our country overseas. They shouldn't have to fight for a job when they come home.

It's Veterans Day 2011, and the Great Recession continues. Just as in years past, American veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are coming home to a country that cannot provide them the basic dignity of having a job or a place to live. But this year something is different: they are marching for justice.

The status quo is grim. The unemployment rate among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan is 12 percent, even higher than the unacceptable national average of 9 percent. In 2009, over 130,000 U.S. vets spent at least one night in a homeless shelter. Our veterans should be coming home to a country that honors and respects their sacrifice. Instead, our country's largest banks, including JP Morgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, have been accused of overcharging them on their mortgages.

Now veterans across the country are joining the Occupy movement to protest economic inequality, denounce corporate greed, and demand jobs. Many of these brave heroes have also challenged law enforcement in their local communities for attacking unarmed civilians. But some of these veterans have also been attacked by police for exercising their own freedom of speech.

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When Scott Olsen, an Iraq War veteran and Marine, demonstrated at an Occupy rally in Oakland, he was shot with a tear gas canister and sustained severe head injuries. In response, hundreds of veterans marched silently through lower Manhattan (from Vietnam Veterans Park to Zuccotti Park) to protest his mistreatment and show solidarity for the Occupy movement. Since then, another veteran has been hospitalized in Oakland, this time with a ruptured spleen from being beaten by the police. Despite this backlash, the Occupy Veterans movement is growing as men and women who have served in our armed forces continue their fight on behalf of American citizens and their constitutional rights.

Some progress has already been made. The Move Your Money campaign is taking money away from the multinational corporations that are putting our veterans out in the street and redirecting it to credit unions that will invest in our communities. A proposed Veterans Jobs Bill would provide tax breaks for companies that hire jobless veterans and veterans with service-oriented disabilities. But there is much more to be done. While we take today to honor veterans' service, we must remember that we cannot tolerate a financial and economic system that leaves them broke, homeless, and in debt.

Reese Neader is the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network’s Policy Director.

There's no good explanation for why Wall Street continues to suck up vast amounts of money except that there is a flaw in the system itself.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters were not immune to the news of Steve Jobs's passing. "A ripple of shock went through our crowd," Thorin Caristo, a leader of the movement's web outreach, told the Associated Press. He later called for a moment of silence from the stubborn assembly at Zuccotti Park, and the 99% paid tribute to an exceptional member of the other club.

The gesture failed to move some. National Review's Daniel Foster envisioned "viscera of a thousand heads exploding from the sheer force of cognitive dissonance," while conservative columnist Michelle Malkin said that the protesters honoring Jobs's life and work "without a trace of irony" provided the "teachable moment of the week." The lesson, it seems, is that one cannot critique capitalism without also rejecting every single capitalist, a conclusion that is not only logically flawed but one that was famously rejected by William F. Buckley, Jr., the ideological avatar of the modern conservative movement and a founder of the National Review.

In a column written just a few years before his death, Buckley condemned what he called the "institutional embarrassments" of capitalism, CEOs whose enormous compensation packages defy the gravitational pull of poor stock performance. Buckley was no equalitarian, and he drew a contrast between the "executive plunder" reaped by certain CEOs and the allowances that may be made for the likes of a Thomas Edison. Were such a person alive today, he said, "it would be unwise to cavil at any arrangement whatever made by a company seeking his services exclusively."

Unwise, but more importantly, unwarranted, for at the heart of Buckley's argument is an appeal to fairness. It does not seem unreasonable that a Thomas Edison, or a Steve Jobs, be paid a lot more than the rest of us. But when it comes to people who not only fail to create value, but actually supervise its destruction, it seems outrageous that they should make more over a long lunch than most people make in an entire year. Or, as Buckley puts it, "What is going on is phony. It is shoddy, it is contemptible, and it is philosophically blasphemous."

To be clear, were he still with us today, Bill Buckley would not be occupying Wall Street. His aim was to save capitalism from itself, and he would likely chide the protesters for trying to save us from capitalism. Still, the sense of moral outrage that infuses his column -- aptly titled "Capitalism's Boil" -- is not altogether different from that expressed by the weather-weary demonstrators. Doubtless, there are some who want to uproot capitalism altogether and replace it with some other system for distributing scarce goods, but one suspects that most who have turned out are simply looking to air the familiar grievances of the financial crisis (joblessness, soaring poverty, crushing debt) and shame those on Wall Street who cashed in on a crisis they helped create.

The same may be said with even greater confidence for the support the movement is enjoying across the country. It is not the case that a nation of closet communists has finally found a voice; rather, the protesters have come to embody a common sense that something is wrong with American capitalism -- that the system simply isn't working. In this respect, the focus on Wall Street is both apt and overbroad. Overbroad because, if you brush the complex instruments that precipitated the financial crisis, you won't find the fingerprints of every banker on Wall Street. Apt because the success of the financial sector as a whole not only defies the experience of the last few years, but the story of the American middle class for over three decades.

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Paul Krugman has famously called this period The Great Divergence. "We're no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits of economic growth are widely shared," he said in the inaugural post of his New York Times blog. "Between 1979 and 2005 the real income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent." During the same period, the percentage of the nation's wealth held by the top 1% grew from 20.5% in 1979 to 33.8% in 2007. These trends have helped to set the U.S. apart from other developed countries in terms of wealth inequality. According to the C.I.A World Fact book, the U.S. currently ranks 39th in unequal wealth distribution, edging out Cameroon and Iran but just behind Bulgaria and Jamaica. By contrast, the UK comes in at 91st place, with Canada 102nd and Germany 126th.

The financial sector doesn't tell the whole story of growing inequality, but it certainly plays a central role. As Simon Johnson described its meteoric rise in a 2009 essay for The Atlantic:

From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.

The inequality within the financial sector is more striking still, with the most successful managing directors taking home enough to buy and sell a brace of lowly associates. Again, the numbers speak for themselves: In 1986, the highest paid CEO on Wall Street was John Gutfreund of Salomon Brothers, who made $3.1 million. In 2007, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, made just short of $68 million.

To be sure, Americans have always had a high tolerance for economic inequality, particularly compared with their European peers. The quintessential American tale is still the rags to riches story, and for Democrats and Republicans alike, 'class warfare' is an accusation to be rebutted, not an open call to arms. Indeed, as the unlikely tribute to Steve Jobs attests, even for those who are willing to roundly object to the growing gap between the very rich and the rest of us, the problem is not inequality per se, but giving a satisfactory account for it. As Bill Buckley well understood, economic systems have to give a moral account of who wins, who loses, and why, particularly insofar as those systems are shaped by democratic choices. It is not hard to give a compelling account for why someone like Steve Jobs grows far richer than the rest of us -- his success tends to vindicate capitalism, not undermine it -- but the same may not be said for the financial sector in general. The problem isn't that the average banker doesn't work hard (the hours are grueling) nor that his work isn't essential to helping maintain a modern, civilized society (it is); the problem is that the same may be said for an ER nurse or a sixth grade teacher, and it isn't immediately clear why one should make 10 times as much as the other.

Buckley said of the CEO pay packages he so despised that "extortions of that size tell us, really, that the market system is not working," meaning that the free market, left to its own devices, does not allow for such gross distortions. This is certainly the account conservatives prefer when they try to explain Wall Street's inordinate success. According to them, anti-competitive regulations, cheap money from the Fed, and the cozy relationship between the big banks and Washington have allowed the financial sector to prosper not because of capitalism, but despite it.

To liberals, this sounds ridiculous. After 30 years of lower taxes, freer trade, weaker unions, and a general trend toward deregulation, the idea that growing inequality and Wall Street's exceptional success somehow defy the natural tendencies of capitalism is an astonishing exercise in wishful thinking. The forces of the free market alone may not explain these trends, but they seem hardly at odds.

Increasingly, the Occupy Wall Street movement has been faulted for not taking explicit sides in this dispute, but like Buckley in his column, the aim of their protests is not policy prescription, but moral persuasion. When your house is on fire, you don't stand around wondering whether faulty wiring or an arsonist is to blame. You raise a hue and cry until your neighbors fill the street.

John Paul Rollert is a doctoral student at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His essay, "Does the Top Really Support the Bottom? - Adam Smith and the Problem of the Commercial Pyramid," was recently published by The Business and Society Review.

What would cutting a mostly solvent program doling out already meager benefits get us? Very little.

The Congressional Super Committee to cut the budget deficit, due to report soon, has let it be known that it will cut Social Security benefits. Let me be short and sour about this. It is a public relations stunt. They basically say so. All this is about is showing the world America is serious about cutting its long-term deficit. The nation has the guts to do what it takes. It is no bleeding heart country. It is willing to beat up on the elderly.

Other allegedly serious Democratic economists from fancy institutions have made the same argument. The reason is simple. You seemingly can make modest adjustments to Social Security to dent or even eliminate the projected longer-run shortfall. You can't do that with Medicare.

In exchange for these Social Security cuts, the Democrats expect the Republicans to consider tax increases. They are probably going to be rolled again by the intransigent Republicans, who believe avoiding all taxes on the rich is the sure path to infinite reelectability.

So let's be clear. The Social Security Administration projects that benefits will rise by one percent of GDP from five percent to six percent over the next 20 years or so and then stabilize or even fall a bit due to the rising elderly population. One percent. That's what all this is about.

This increase can be covered completely by raising payroll taxes by 6.2 to 7.2 percent for workers and employers. All of it can be covered by eliminating the cap on Social Security taxes, now about $109,000 a year. Even though it's not practical, raising the cap to the point where it covers 90 percent of wages earned -- the original level -- would go a long way to paying for benefits.

But let me remind us all: There is plenty of room to raise other taxes. America is almost the lowest taxed rich nation in the world. But it doesn't have the highest standard of living for its average citizens -- not compared to free education in Europe, much cheaper or free health care, and so on.

Let me also remind us that Social Security is not very generous. The average payment is $14,000 a year. It is getting less generous. It used to replace 55 percent of retirement income, but benefits were reduced in the 1980s. It now covers on average 41 percent of retirement income. In 2031, it will cover 32 percent of retirement income.

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We have already reduced the program's generosity. Yet Social Security provides nearly all income for one quarter of the elderly and more than half the income for more than half of the elderly.

The Super Committee will say it simply wants to make the inflation calculation more accurate. It will reduce benefits. But government research suggests elderly costs rise faster in price than the traditional measures of inflation.

The Super Committee is likely to do some real axing, if it gets its way, on Medicare. But it, too, is not a generous program. The typical beneficiary earns $23,000 a year, yet co-pays and deductibles are high. One analysis by the CBO showed that the typical employer plan provides 88 percent of beneficiary's needs. According to an analysis by the Congressional Research Service, Medicare provides only 76 percent.

One last important point. Big cuts in Medicare and Medicaid will mean that health care expenditures will go up because Americans will get their insurance in the private market or on the public dole somehow. It will not cut overall medical costs, which are ridiculously high in America, as we know. Paul ryan's absurd Medicare plan, according to the CBO, would raise American spending dramatically overall. In sum, cutting Medicare sharply will either mean more health care expenditures for the nation as a whole or a large chunk of the elderly going without adequate coverage altogether.

What will drive future budget deficits is Medicare and Medicaid, not Social Security, and for the umpteenth time, the reason is that overall health costs are expected to rise quickly. This means we have to reform our uniquely inefficient healthcare system. Congress is, as usual, diverting us from the real issues. No wonder Americans like Occupy Wall Street.

A final word on taxes. The top 1 percent pay federal income taxes at a rate of 23 percent. If we raised it to their rate only ten years ago, we'd collect about $100 billion a year. If we reversed the Bush tax cuts on those who make $250,000 a year, we'd raise about $830 billion over ten years. If we reversed all the tax cuts, including on the middle class, which I'd favor, we'd raise about $3.5 trillion over ten years.

We have plenty of taxing capacity to take care of our needs. We simply refuse to act as a modern nation, driven by myths that we can somehow return to the simplicity of colonial America. But even colonial America was more complex than what today's Republicans imagine it was.

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Jeff Madrick is the author of Age of Greed.

Disgusting pictures that have surfaced from a foreclosure mill's Halloween party reveal a deeper theory of whom debt laws should protect.

If you haven't already, you should read Joe Nocera's column "What the Costumes Reveal." He includes a slideshow of six photos from a Halloween party last year at the foreclosure mill law firm Steven J. Baum, in which the associates were all dressed as homeless people who were just evicted. Part of the office featured a rundown neighborhood destroyed by mass foreclosures and the sign "Baum Estates" hanging above it. Another picture shows a consumer attorney with her eyes cut out. Baum has recently settled on charges that it was manufacturing and robosigning foreclosure documents for $2 million.

It is easy to dismiss this as a particular kind of awfulness, just jerks run amok. Perhaps they are going through some cognitive dissonance from the misery they are inducing. Maybe they are taking on the roles created by a system of aggressive corner cutting. Maybe. But I think there's a more powerful ideology behind their actions that gets at how the 1% and elites view the rules governing troubled debt in this country and how they should function.

Let's look closely at what the signs say. The "Baum Estates" sign hanging over a rundown shantytown shows that the only concern is the ability to collect, without concern for the community. Parts of the procedures necessary for eviction -- “I was never served," "order to show cause" -- are held in contempt. They convey the idea that consumers have no valid excuses when it comes to bad debt. They vilify consumer advocates. They mock the idea that consumers should have any legal recourse during foreclosure, that banks and creditors need to follow basic rules, and that any concerns other than creditors' (rundown neighborhoods, for example) should get consideration.

This notion that those being foreclosed on should be embarrassed about fighting the action and that they, not the banks, are the ones undermining the system has been voiced elsewhere. From last year, Arnold Kling wrote that:

However, the %&*#^ lawyers for the borrower come in and claim standing to challenge the foreclosure on the grounds that the foreclosure notice was sent by someone who has not properly documented that he is the noteholder. Legally, they may have standing to do this. Morally, they do not. The sensible policy would be for the government to step in and legislate that borrowers have no standing to sue unless they are claiming to have complied with the terms of the note.

People calling out banks for not following the rules are immoral, and the government should step in to make sure that the laws governing debts work to protect the maximum return for creditors. And Mark Calabria, director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute, writes that: "The current efforts by states to use technical mistakes by lenders to allow borrowers to remain in homes without paying could ultimately undermine the very concept of a mortgage."

"Technical mistakes." Notice the blame in Calabria's comment. Banks, by not following the trust and REMIC laws that constitute the securitization process, aren't the ones undermining the process in which banks can legally bring foreclosures to court, and thus the concept of a mortgage. The states, and ultimately the homeowners, are undermining it by pointing out that the banks haven't followed the rules. This comment is consistent with the idea that the only reason to have laws is to protect creditors from debtors.

This view of the world has its roots in a theory of how the rules governing debt, especially bankruptcy, should function in this country. A heuristic can be used to understand it -- it's called the creditor's bargain. In this idea, the rules should only exist to the extent that they benefit the creditor's ability to collect money. It's simple: if a law, custom, norm, or rule helps creditors collect when things go wrong, it is a good one. If it takes into account concerns other than creditors' return -- say, destroyed neighborhoods, whether banks follow the rules, etc. -- they are worthless.

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This theory imagines, making a perverse mockery of the egalitarianism of Rawls' theory, that all the 1% and all the creditors were put behind a veil of ignorance where they did not know what kind of 1% and creditor they'd be. Maybe they'd have collateral that was sensitive to the business cycle; maybe they'd be slow to notice trouble and thus slow to collect. Given the wide variety of problems that could occur, and the way debtors could play them off each either, the creditor class bargains on rules that benefit them all according to the rank of their claims. And benefitting creditors is the only thing that the rules of debt should consider.

In this world, debtors probably could challenge the legality of their foreclosures, making sure proper procedure was followed. But that's not what the rules are meant to do. The rules are just there to benefit creditors, not debtors. It is in this world that those Halloween costumes make perfect sense. I love pointing out how passionate libertarians like Calabria have been all for the sanctity of contract when it comes to bankruptcy reforms like "cramdown," but when it comes to the idea that all these mortgages are unsecured debt because of bank-led abuses in the chain of property records, they get angry at debtors, even though they are still holders of contracts. But again, if the law is just there to protect creditors against the difficulty of collecting on debtors, not to provide a level playing field for those with debt, it makes perfect sense.

It also makes perfect sense that creditors and bankers haven't gone to jail, but debtors who took out a liar's loan have gone to jail. It makes sense that elites, like former Peterson Institute CEO David Walker, want to see debtors' prisons on the agenda while no elites talk about jail sentences for the abuses in property law. The law is there to coordinate the best interests of creditors, not provide rules and protection for debtors.

(If you thought classical liberalism/libertarianism was all about how contracts, laws, and markets provide level playing fields and protection from abuses of the powerful -- how they take feudal privileges and melt them into air -- and not about how they reconfigure the government, customs, and laws to be protectors of capital and hierarchy, you need to get a copy of The Reactionary Mind, pronto.)

Guess which law professor, almost 25 years ago, provided the defining critique of the intellectual theory that debt laws and bankruptcy should only narrowly consider the interests of creditors, and has worked to provide a counter theory? That's right, Elizabeth Warren. Every time you hear that the banks are afraid of her folksy wisdom and charming accent, also remember that they are afraid of her ability to demolish legal theory that puts the banks and creditors at the center of the law. She noted that the economic value of bankruptcy is only one part, and that our understanding of bankruptcy should have four goals: "(1) to enhance the value of the failing debtor; (2) to distribute value according to multiple normative principles; (3) to internalize the costs of the business failure to the parties dealing with the debtor; and (4) to create reliance on private monitoring."

Warren also noted that bankruptcy was "an attempt to reckon with a debtor's multiple defaults and to distribute the consequences among a number of different actors. Bankruptcy encompasses a number of competing -- and sometimes conflicting -- values in this distribution." For instance, the costs of a foreclosure to a community are a major externality which should be considered. In the same paper she writes, “bankruptcy policy also takes into account the distributional impact of a business failure on parties who are not creditors and who have no formal legal rights to the assets of the business."

Though the Halloween pictures are disgusting, they are a symptom of a larger view of the way the law should work that is even worse -- one in which debtor's protections are mocked, the rule of law is ignored, and shantytowns proudly display their creditor's name over them. This is the way many elites view the rules when it comes to debt. Thankfully, there is more and more mass opposition to this perversion of the law.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.