A look at some of Romney’s assertions and how they compare with the facts:

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ROMNEY: “America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, tame the deficit and help create jobs. Instead, he bailed out the public sector, gave billions of your dollars to the companies of his friends, and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined.”

THE FACTS. Hardly. Presidents from George Washington through George W. Bush ran the national debt up to $10.62 trillion, the amount it was on the day Obama took office. Today, it is $15.67 trillion, according to the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Public Debt. So it has gone up by $5.05 trillion under Obama. That’s roughly half of the amount amassed by all the other presidents combined.

In short, the debt has gone up by about half under Obama. Under Ronald Reagan, it tripled.

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ROMNEY: “I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno. We will stop borrowing unfathomable sums of money we can’t even imagine, from foreign countries we’ll never even visit. I will bring us together to put out the fire.”

THE FACTS: Romney’s tax and spending plans don’t support his vow to dampen the debt fire. He proposes to cut taxes and expand the armed forces, putting yet more stress on the budget, and his promise to slash domestic spending isn’t backed by the big specifics. Romney’s tax plan would cut the top income tax rate to 28 percent from 35 percent and other rates by 20 percent each. He says he’d broaden the tax base and eliminate many deductions in the process, but details are missing.

A study by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget concluded earlier this year that Romney’s plans would not make a dent in deficits, and could worsen them considerably. That study was done before Romney upped his tax cuts, inviting even deeper debt.

That’s not to say he can’t at some point lay out the spending cuts necessary to achieve his aims. But he would have to slash domestic programs by more than 20 percent — far more than the 5 percent in immediate cuts he has proposed. It is nearly unthinkable that Congress would approve the evisceration of basic federal functions such as food inspection, air traffic control, the Border Patrol, FBI, grants to local governments, health research, housing and heating aid for the poor, food aid for pregnant women, national parks and much more.

Nowhere in Tuesday’s speech was there a new idea of how Romney would accomplish the promised deficit reduction. He spoke generally of reforming Social Security and Medicare, eliminating duplicative government programs, and transferring some functions to the states or the private sector, adding that he would “streamline everything that’s left.”

The closest he has come to laying out a specific spending plan has been in his endorsement of the budget blueprint passed this year by House Republicans, which also fails to produce his promised deficit reductions.

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ROMNEY: “The people of Iowa and America have watched President Obama for nearly four years, much of that time with Congress controlled by his own party. And rather than put out the spending fire, he has fed the fire. He has spent more and borrowed more. … When you add up his policies, this president has increased the national debt by $5 trillion.”

THE FACTS: Much of the increase in the debt is due to lower tax revenues from depressed corporate and individual incomes and high joblessness in the worst recession since the Great Depression. The recession officially began in December 2007, when George W. Bush was president and the national debt stood at just over $9 trillion. Financial bailouts, stimulus programs and auto rescue spending that started under Bush and continued under Obama contributed to the run-up of the debt.

But so did the Bush-era tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003. With bipartisan support, Congress has extended the tax cuts until the end of this year, and Romney’s proposals for big cuts of his own would risk another squeeze on revenue.

To be sure, Obama as a presidential candidate in 2008 was just as eager as Romney is now to pin blame for mounting debt on a president from the other party.

Ignoring economic circumstances and the role of both parties in Congress, Obama accused President George W. Bush in that campaign of driving up debt by $4 trillion “by his lonesome” and taking out “a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children.”

Atwood appears in the documentary; she is shown working on her manuscript and giving her talks, which were commissioned by the celebrated Massey Lectures series in Canada. Her ideas link stories that include the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Canadian mogul Conrad Black’s prison stint, efforts to unionize tomato farm workers in Florida, and most memorably, a neighborhood feud in Albania that resulted in a family being unable to leave their home for fear of being killed by their enemies.

Atwood, in addition to being one of the grande dames of world literature, is a veritable font of curious information and lore on everything from pest control (“Cockroaches hate cucumber peel,” she informed me) to ancient trading systems to hockey. She emits a string of sardonic wisecracks with the lockjawed, deadpan delivery of Philip Marlowe. In other words, she’s really fun to talk to, and the release of “Payback” gave me a fine opportunity to do so.

You make no claim to prescience about the financial crisis that hit just as the book version of “Payback” came out. What inspired it instead?

In a former life I was a student of Victorian literature, which you can’t be without coming smack up against money to an even greater extent than if you are, for instance, an Elizabethan scholar. The 19th century is the one where money becomes the big determinant. The big story is the industrialists, who are making kajillions of dollars some of the time, and at other times are undergoing big busts in which they close factories and everyone’s thrown out of work.

That’s when investment in the stock market became a thing. People didn’t really understand it. (And they still don’t!) Little old ladies would put their money in and they’d get an income, but then something would happen, as in “Cranford,” and they’d lose all their money.

“Wuthering Heights,” when you’re 20, is about the mad passion of Cathy and Heathcliff. When you’re 50, it’s about, “Where did Heathcliff make his money? How did he get so rich?” What was the Great Gatsby doing that caused him to have all those nice pastel shirts — which have always struck me as a nice detail — and that allowed him to pursue his passion for Daisy? What was he doing? There was something dishonest; something having to do with money that we didn’t entirely understand but we knew was shady.

The film is so wide-ranging in its topics that I did wonder if someone who hadn’t read the book would find it easy to see the connections.

I think it all hangs together. It’s a necklace with first one bead, then a different bead, then a different bead. And then a repetition of the pattern. I’m the string. [Jennifer Baichwal] strings it together at the end with that wonderful device of having each of the people interviewed read a little bit from the end of the book, which — boo-hoo! — it makes me cry every time. Especially the Mexican tomato worker reading to his son in Spanish.

It seems an especially challenging project to visualize onscreen because one of your arguments is that debt is imaginary.

No, money is imaginary. Debts are real. Let’s pretend that you save Mr. Brown’s life. What does he owe you?

He owes me “his life.”

You come to him later and say, “Will you write a recommendation for college for my niece?” and he says no. How do you feel?

Outraged!

There you go. That’s why it’s real. It’s real because it’s a visceral, emotional thing and we all know that. We all know that when the engagement breaks up, you give back the ring. People who keep the ring are really [makes a face of great disgust].

These are emotional balances. They’re in us long before money enters the picture. They’re in us as kids, little kids. “It’s not fair,” kicks in probably between 3 and 4, big time. His cookie is bigger, I want one too.

It’s certainly true of primates. If I scratch your back, you owe me one and I’ll remember that. We’re social beings, always exchanging — exchanging good for good and also payback for wrongs. Even if we’re not actually exchanging wrongs, we’re certainly thinking about it. Which is why we like to read a good revenge story now and again.

Speaking of revenge, the feuding Albanians in the film …

That is so amazing. Joined at the hip. How are they ever going to get out of it? Because it’s become so meaningful, particularly to the one who wants the vengeance.

With that story, even more than most of the others in the film, you go through a journey. At first, I felt so sorry for this family confined to their house while their fields fall into disrepair. That their enemy is wearing a shiny leather jacket that makes him look like a nightclub gangster doesn’t help. But then, later in the film, he lifts up his shirt to show the gruesome scars on his abdomen where the other man shot him, several times, and that really drives it home: He shot him. I don’t think I could forgive someone who’d done that to me.

Also, in that culture, if you just give it over, you’re a wuss. Some of those situations apparently do get resolved. There are mediators who work on it, and sums of money change hands. There’s a big party and everybody’s pals. But not with this outfit. It doesn’t look as if that’s going to get finished any time soon.

It’s the most primal example of debt in the film, but the segments about the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico are close. There is a debt that can never be repaid.

Not with money. You can pay money to the people involved, but you can’t pay money to the fish. There isn’t a money equivalent. There’s a habitat-restoration equivalent which you could see in money terms, but nature doesn’t deal in money. Nature deals in chemistry and physics. If you create a disequilibrium in nature that is very large, ultimately that will affect you. It’s not that nature is punishing you; it’s that if you kill all the blue-green algae in the ocean, you can’t breathe.

Then there are the farmworkers in Florida. How do they fit into your concept of debt?

Jennifer went out to find real-life, visceral, dramatic stories that illustrated the core ideas of the book. The farm workers’ story is about disequilibrium in the financial system. If one percent is at the top, who’s at the bottom? You’re pretty much looking at it with the farm workers. That’s at the bottom of what we eat and buy.

Some people might find it difficult to see how that relates to debt.

Because they’re thinking of debt only in money terms. Money is a fairly late addition to the human arsenal of tools. Trading preceded money. Money is just an invention. It has no value in itself. You can’t eat it, you can’t smoke it, you can’t drink it or live in a house made of it, and you can’t wear it to keep you warm. It’s a token of exchange, and it facilitates exchange at a distance.

We think of debt as connected with that, but it’s a tip-of-the-iceberg thing. In fact, debt is connected with any form of exchange, with who owes what to whom and are they getting fair value. Is it fair value if you work ten hours a day and you can’t make a living wage?

Both book and film end with urging us to reconceive debt.

What if we stopped thinking of it as just something having to do with our credit cards and instead think of it in terms of equilibrium and imbalance? What arrangement of those things would be healthier for us?

But if most people’s feeling for debt is as primal as you say it is, can it be reframed in that way, say, to be more environmentalist? Can you get them to feel that they owe a debt to nature?

Well, they used to. That’s where religion originated. The earliest gods were vegetation gods; or weather gods; or in hunting societies, animal gods. When you get into agriculture, you have grain gods, dying and rising gods. You owed them sacrifices, partly because they were giving something to you, and you owed them something back. Now we need to graduate to the understanding that while we don’t have to throw ourselves into the ocean to propitiate the blue-green algae, if we kill it — and with it a major source of oxygen — then it’s curtains for us.

There’s also a lot they don’t know. Some things, like your race or marital status, are prohibited by law from being considered in credit scoring. Other things, like your employment history, where you live, or how much you’ve saved, don’t fit into the algorithms FICO uses. Any normal person might suspect they are relevant to assessing the quality of your credit, but they won’t make a difference in your score.

We are all living, breathing human beings, but big businesses and banks have turned us into half-baked statistics in order to grease the wheels of capitalism – wheels that often catch us in their spokes. At best these statistics are inexact; in many cases, they are much worse than that, with disastrous consequences for the humans they purport to describe.

How did this happen and what can we do about it?

A Bit of History

Credit reporting in the U.S. kicked off in the 19th century when retail merchants and other interested parties created loosely organized local exchanges of information. In a big, young and mobile country, lenders understandably wanted to know something about the people doing the borrowing. Given the cultural norms and the lack of reliable data around, creditworthiness was closely connected to popular notions of “character,” like honesty and thriftiness. This emphasis led local retailers to collect intimate details about peoples’ health, drinking habits and sexual behavior from newspapers and gossip. Being Jewish could also earn you a bad credit rating, or being Chinese, or Catholic, or unmarried, all of which were associated with questionable “character.”

As communication technology developed in the 20th century, the loose-knit organizations evolved into credit bureaus that went national – they were actually among the first businesses in the U.S. to do so. They got quite savvy and efficient about zipping information about consumers from coast to coast. FICO was founded in 1956. Two years later it began selling its credit scoring system. It was the first company to develop algorithms for generating credit scores and got paid royalties for their use.

As these systems grew and became more deeply embedded in the nation’s financial system, they increasingly impacted the the lives and opportunities of citizens. The work of advocacy groups defending consumer rights led to new laws that tried to address fairness and accuracy in credit scoring. In 1971, the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA)  gave consumers, among other things, the right to view and dispute reports. The laws continue to be tweaked in an effort to keep up with a rapidly expanding and increasingly influential business. In 2003, an amendment was passed giving consumers the right to view one free credit report a year.

The Federal Reserve inherited consumer rule writing in the 1960s, and for a long time, officials at the Fed took their role seriously and had competent staff. Paul Volcker, Fed chairman from 1979 to 1987, was widely regarded as reasonably tough on consumer affairs and maintained a decent apparatus to regulate industry players and investigate abuses.

Then along came Alan Greenspan. Greenspan’s fanciful free-market economic theories and world view rendered him completely uninterested in consumer affairs matters. Consumer affairs work at the Fed declined sharply in quality and strength. In the past, the Fed had promoted fairness and accuracy in credit scoring as a shield for banks that might face discrimination charges. But in the 1980s and 1990s, bankers turned the shield into a sword. They began holding the scores over consumers’ heads.

Pressures from Wall Street convinced banks to chase consumer fee income, and they began to use credit scores as a device for justifying higher fees. Ever wonder how bank CEO pay started skyrocketing? Socking consumers with above-average interest rates and collecting fees on late payments and other penalties is a big chunk of bank earnings today. If consumers balked or missed a payment, they would be threatened with lowered credit scores. Consumers became hostages.

Today, FICO sells its assessment of your creditworthiness to credit rating bureaus – the three giants are Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, and their reports influence everything from credit cards to mortgages to job offers. A bad score will cost you dearly. For example, a borrower with a bad credit score could end up paying more than $5,000 in extra interest on a $20,000, five-year car loan. Most banks use the scores to set finance charges; the lower the score, the higher the interest rate on a new loan.

Millions of Americans have seen their credit scores plummet since the financial crash. Meanwhile, the credit-scoring business is rife with problems and abuses, ranging from processes that favor speed over accuracy to preferential treatment for the rich and powerful. Unless you are wealthy, you will likely have to borrow money at some point in your life, whether to buy a house or attend college. Here are a few things you need to know about these all-powerful scores that dominate our lives.

Fast, Cheap and Out of Control

Businesses and banks rely on consumer credit bureaus as authoritative sources of accurate information and analysis. But are their calculations up to snuff? Not really, alas.

A credit score is created when an algorithm is applied to the data in your credit file. This system started out with limited pencil-and-paper calculations, and later clunky operations on early computers. Things took off in the 1980s with the development of turbo-computing power and the ability to do massive data mining. A new branch of applied science was born, and by the 1990s, firms were using large databases in order to make predictions about consumer behavior.

Proponents hailed this as a major intellectual breakthrough. What was once a slow and cumbersome process of pouring big data sets into computers and then painstakingly figuring out correlations became a fast, easy operation on mega-computers. Once the firm ponied up the large initial investment in computers, it was home-free. New consumers and more data could be added at very little cost. This system was irresistibly alluring to mathematicians and statisticians – and to profit seekers.

But the new statistical models could best be described by the title of an Errol Morris documentary: “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control.” The beauty of credit scores for the financial industry is that they’re inexpensive to produce. Profit incentives have led to a sort of cut-and-run, brute force data mining in which the possibility of errors is enormous. Political economist Thomas Ferguson, who uses large data sets to do analysis of voting patterns, political money and stock market phenomena, scoffs at the crudity of systems used in credit scoring. “The results probably would not pass muster in any serious academic journal,” he says. “You almost certainly couldn’t publish the results.”

One problem with credit scoring is related to the so-called “lantern problem” common to scientific inquiries, illustrated in the stock image of a person looking for lost keys where the light is shining rather than where the keys are actually lost. In the case of evaluating credit risk, the statistician will use whatever data is around to plug into the algorithms, rather than ferreting out information that would best determine actual credit worthiness. She may be able to get a certain type of history this way—drawn from your checks, purchases and other typical activity. But she can’t get at the atypical parts, such as whether or not you are out of work, about to come into an inheritance, or have co-signed a note so your children could get a mortgage.

Because credit scoring and reporting firms sell their products to banks, and banks like to assign high interest rates, guess what kind of information about you they don’t like to put in their reports? Positive information. Negative information, like missing a payment on your phone bill, is welcome. Positive information, like your steadily increasingly salary or the fact that you paid down a credit card, is not.

Credit scoring has some predictive accuracy, but not nearly enough to justify its influence. In old-fashioned risk evaluation, a loan officer at a bank would sit down with an individual and study the typical and atypical factors that make up a person’s credit history. Then he or she would make a judgement about credit worthiness that incorporated what wasn’t in the statistical models, as well as what was. Obviously, you can’t rapidly and cheaply assess credit risk on tens of millions of people using personal interviews. And so now we have a fast, cheap, effectively hit-or-miss system that can prevent you from renting an apartment or getting a job. The motivation of the industry is now less about actually finding out if you’re credit worthy, and more about finding out how lenders can make profits off you.

The Oligopoly Game

Competition is not exactly robust when it comes to consumer credit scoring and reporting. The industry, which does $1 billion a year in business, is dominated by four players: FICO controls the vast majority of the credit score market in the U. S. and Canada, and its scores are distributed by only three major companies, Experian, Equifax and Transunion. FICO is at the very top, condensing our credit worthiness into the three-digit FICO score. Experian, Equifax and Transunion use the FICO scoring system to come up with their own credit scores, based on data they collect about you in their systems. They then sell access to those scores to millions of businesses that want to make various decisions and judgments about you.

Around 90 percent of banks use FICO scores, along with the 25 largest credit card issuers. Talk about industry dominance!

When an industry becomes an oligopoly, several things that are bad for consumers tend to happen. Product innovation becomes limited. Players can collude to raise prices, even as the cost of doing credit scoring and reporting goes down. Up until very recently, you could not get a credit report or score without paying for it, a major reason for the 2003 law requiring that consumers be allowed to view one free report per year.

Worse still, there’s not much incentive to get things right when oligopoly conditions exists. The law provides little penalty to these giant firms when they screw up, and it’s not like consumers can vote with their feet when the product is shabby. You can’t remove your information from the bureaus without enormous hassle, and you can’t take your business elsewhere.

Error Explosion

A shockingly high portion of consumer credit reports contain errors. But just as firms are not rewarded for including positive information in your credit report, neither are they rewarded for removing erroneous information.

Horror stories abound. Like the man who was refused a mortgage for money owed on an appendectomy he never had. Chances are high that if you just ask amongst your friends, you’ll find someone who was inconvenienced–or worse–by a credit score or report error. A study released by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group in June 2004 found that 79 percent of the consumer credit reports surveyed contained some kind of error. Of these, a quarter contained mistakes serious enough to result in the denial of credit, such as false delinquencies or accounts that belong to somebody else.

Several years ago when I was looking to buy an apartment, I checked my credit reports and found a listing for a bank account I supposedly opened in Texas, a place I have never lived. I had to go through an irritating and time-consuming process of writing dispute letters in order to get this false information removed.

Typical errors include credit bureaus mixing the files and identities of consumers; attributing a debt to the wrong consumer; incorrectly recording payment histories; and inaccuracies caused by identity theft or compromised data, which the agencies often try to conceal.

Credit reporting agencies have a legal obligation to address errors, but the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is lax in enforcing the rules. The perfunctory, mechanized system currently used by the industry to deal with error complaints is a travesty. (For more on this, see the 2009 report by the National Consumer Law Center, “Automated Injustice.”) Credit bureaus don’t have much incentive to carry out thorough investigations, and the burden of proof is placed squarely on the consumer. The consumer, after all, is not the primary paying customer, so why should the credit reporting agency spend its dollars and time resolving her disputes?

If you get screwed by this system, you can take your complaint to court. But that can be a slow, costly and frustrating experience. An entire sub-industry, the credit repair business, has arisen to address this consumer nightmare – and to profit from it. The credit repair industry has a symbiotic relationship with the reporting and scoring industry. Companies charge stiff fees, maybe $250 up front plus monthly maintenance, for promising to do things you should, in theory, be able to accomplish yourself, like writing dispute letters. Why do they have better luck? Maybe because they get the V.I.P. treatment. And they aren’t the only ones.

Preferential Treatment for the 1 Percent

The major credit ratings bureaus are known to have a two-tiered system for addressing errors. If you’re rich and powerful, you get special treatment. In May 2011, a report by the New York Times revealed that Equifax, Experian and TransUnion keep a V.I.P. list of celebrities, politicians, judges and other muckety-mucks who will get rapid response to error claims. And for the other 99 percent? Expect to have your complaint funneled into an automated system and farmed out to overseas contractors where a worker will spend an average of two minutes figuring out the problem.

Perhaps this explains why members of Congress are so uninterested in credit scoring issues. They don’t have to worry about them. Time to Occupy the credit bureaus?

Who’s Looking at You?

Credit reports are a goldmine of information on consumers. Landlords, insurance companies, employers and potential employers, child support enforcement agencies, and others can now gain access to your report. According to the New York Times, 40 percent of employers now do credit checks on their employees. This creates a vicious cycle whereby a person may get into financial difficulties, say, from an illness, and then find that getting or maintaining a job is impossible due to a low credit score. Which leads to foreclosures. And broken families. And untold human misery.

Who else gets gets to see your scores? Marketers, for one. Generating and selling lists for use in “pre-approved” credit and insurance offers is allowed by law. TransUnion, Experian and Equifax all engage in selling lists of consumers who meet certain criteria in order to receive an offer of credit or insurance. This is the source of the many pre-approved credit offers that clog your mailbox. In order to opt out you must remove your name from any marketing list compiled by a credit rating bureau, whether the list is for pre-approved credit offers or direct marketing. (Call 888-5-OPTOUT or 888-567-8688, or go online to www.optoutprescreen.com.)

Right from the earliest days of the industry, control of information on consumer credit was a problem. When you want to borrow, you do expect to give up some privacy in return for the privilege. But with high-speed, error-prone, profit-driven transfers of information, plus toothless national laws, the chance of your information ending up in the wrong hands is too high for comfort.

Criminals interested in identity theft are delighted by the easy availability of confidential financial information, coupled with sloppy practices by creditors and credit bureaus, which routinely lose data. This makes it a cakewalk for crooks to do things like open accounts in your name. The credit scoring and reporting agencies will now sell you products and services that are supposed to protect you from identity theft — which is ironic, considering that their activities make much of this identity theft possible in the first place!

Then there are potential national security issues. What if a foreign company, say, a Chinese company, decided to buy up an American credit reporting bureau? Or maybe a Mexican drug cartel? What use would they make of that information? Let’s hope we don’t find out.

A People’s Revolution?

The system of credit scoring and reporting is clearly in dire need of reform. But how are we ever going to get it?

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, passed by Congress in 2010, ensures that you are now entitled to a free copy of your credit score if you are denied a loan based on that score, and also if you get a high interest rate on a new loan. This is a positive development. But what is the mantra of nearly every Republican candidate for president? Repeal Dodd-Frank! Meanwhile the Obama administration is less than eager to push on consumer rights — which is why Elizabeth Warren is running for Senate in Massachusetts, instead of heading up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Warren conceived CFPB as a watchdog that would oversee credit scoring and reporting practices and serve as a recourse to consumers. The bureau released a helpful preliminary study in July 2011, which looked at how scores purchased by consumers and those shown to lenders can vary, leaving consumers in the dark about their actual credit worthiness. We can be thankful that the bureau is doing these ongoing investigations. But without Warren at the helm, and given CFPB’s placement inside the bank-centric Federal Reserve, its impact will be restricted. The industry, along the politicians it lavishes money upon, will try to stymie even its most modest efforts.

The truth is that fundamental reforms are required if we want to truly take back our lives from these credit scoring juggernauts. Attorney Walker Todd, who spend two decades in the legal departments of the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Cleveland, assured me that in order to even begin to address the systemic and structural problems of the industry, a full-dress congressional hearing is order, ideally in three parts, as follows:

1) Role of regulators in the industry. Regulators would come in and testify under oath exactly how they conceive of their role. (You get a maximum potential for embarrassment here.)

2) History of the industry. Focus on how the purpose and design of the industry have changed from the pre-1990s to the present. This section would also address structural changes in the banking industry that have made credit reporting a mess.

3) Testimony on misuses. Consumers would get to tell their stories about the misuses of credit scoring and reporting.

The overall purpose of the hearing would be to determine whether current arrangements and systems have improved the availability and condition of credit, degraded it, or left it about the same.

The bad news is that our broken political system makes such a hearing a very difficult proposition. In the House, Rep. Maxine Waters, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, may not have the necessary support to lead such a hearing. In the Senate, the chairman of the Committee on Finance, Max Baucus, wouldn’t touch the subject with a 10-foot pole. Senator Richard Shelby, the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, has sometimes exhibited a healthy distrust of bankers. But his colleague, Senator Tim Johnson, the chair, hails from South Dakota, where Citibank reigns supreme.

Which brings us to the White House. It’s critical to have an executive branch agency that can deal with consumer issues. But of course, CFPB is conveniently housed in the Fed, where the very bank-friendly Ben Bernanke will have to go along with regulations and scrutiny. What we need is a president willing to go to bat on an issue that affects the daily lives of so many of his constituents. We probably shouldn’t hold our breath. With bank-loving advisers like Timothy Geithner and former JPMorgan exec Bill Daley roaming the White House, consumers’ interests are an afterthought. Besides, the president is trying to raise a billion dollars for his election campaign, a great deal of which will come from the financial sector.

What’s left then? A people’s revolution may be the only thing that will truly get the ball rolling. The Occupy Wall Street movement has shined a light on the problem of money and politics, which is crucial to address if there is to be any hope of getting our elected officials to act in our interest. Robust reforms like a constitutional amendment regulating money in elections have been floated, and should remain front-and-center in the national dialogue.

Or how about a credit-reporting agency of the people, for the people and by the people? Similar to the Move Your Money campaign, a Move Your Credit Score campaign might be an experiment worth running, if only to keep the topic in the minds of the public. The idea is that we would all volunteer to submit our information to our own agency, which would agree to sell its scoring to banks and other lenders at a lower fee that those currently charged by credit ratings bureaus. The banks would certainly try to squash it, but a national campaign would be a good way to expose the mess and gain the attention of the mainstream press, which has so far largely confined its reporting to “How to Improve Your Credit Score” pieces.

Taking back the control of our financial destinies is something the 99 percent can certainly rally around. Left, right and center, this is an issue none of us can escape.

Households headed by adults ages 35 and younger had a median net worth of $3,662 in 2009. That marks a 68% decline in wealth, compared to that same age group 25 years earlier.

Over the same time frame, households headed by adults ages 65 years and older, have seen just the opposite. Their wealth rose 42%, to a median of $170,494.

It gets worse, for young people: “37% of the young households held zero or negative net worth in 2009, up from 19% in 1984.”

Boy, so what are all these old people complaining about, so much? (Immigrants, mostly.)

This growing disparity is the result of a lot of factors, but the most powerful force driving the net worth of young people ever downward is debt. Lots of young people are, as we have repeatedly noted, graduating college with mountains of student loan debt, and today’s job market is not exactly robust. And many young people who listened to the conventional wisdom and purchased a home have found that to be a poor investment. Old people who already owned their homes weathered the housing bubble and its collapse largely intact. Homeowners 35 and under were and are simply screwed.

To make up for the fact that advertisers and film industry marketers don’t care for them, old people instead have the United States Congress, which is made up almost entirely of old people. For old people, America is practically a European socialist utopia, with single-payer healthcare and everything. It’s laissez-faire for the rest of us suckers.

The fact that this gap is getting worse helps explain why so many older Americans don’t get it, when the young people complain. The amount of debt young Americans take on today is way higher than it used to be, the opportunities for class mobility are shrinking, and the life choices that worked for earlier generations looking to join the middle or upper classes (college and homeownership) have largely become massive rip-offs.

With the most recent crash and recession, young people have gone from a generation that worried they’d never be able to afford the homes they grew up in to one that is unable to leave those homes (and then they’re called shiftless and lazy), and the response of the political class has been … austerity for most. It is the primary argument of the austerity pushers (and their allies, the deficit hawks) that young people should give in and accept that “we” can’t afford to sustain the fairer society that older Americans enjoyed. That argument would be more convincing if the current Bad Times were affecting everyone equally, instead of simply the already young and poor, but every week more data arrives showing that those who made a killing before the house went bust are doing fine, thank you.

Mike Konczal’s plan is very simple: Just roll back the laws to what they were before 1990. Then, student loans are dischargable in bankruptcy after five years, instead of never.

We are left with a very pressing problem, of course: those who currently suffer under massive student loan debt in the midst of a depressed job market, which is a lot of people. (I still like mass debt forgiveness, but that’s most likely politically impossible.)

That’s addressed by the second part of Konczal’s plan, which is clever: Give citizens the same break we gave major investment banks, which in 2008 were allowed to convert into bank holding companies in order to take advantage of access to the Fed “discount window”:

Why not also do a “deathbed conversion” on those who are suffering under the burden of heavy student debts and low incomes and let them immediately refinance all their student loan rates at the current ultra-low discount window rate? Mass refinance all student loans into the current low rates the financial sector enjoys. This would give the 99% of Americans just a hint of the kind of total government support places like Goldman Sachs have gotten.

In the long term, American higher education (at public schools, at the very least) should be priced as affordably as it is in most of Western Europe, which would require greater public subsidies, but there are warplanes to build and estate taxes to eliminate, so I’m not holding my breath.

In the perhaps more immediately pressing problem of the housing crisis, Reuters’ Felix Salmon is still pushing principle reductions and own-to-rent plans.

In his own-to-rent proposal, banks rent foreclosed properties back to their original owners, allowing people to stay in their homes and pay market rates. “This keeps people in their homes, reduces foreclosure sales, stops houses being trashed when they’re foreclosed upon, and even maximizes the income stream from homes in default on their mortgages,” Salmon says.

Of course, the idea has gone nowhere in Congress. But individuals have simply set up such plans on their own. Meanwhile, wealthy investor Greg Lippman is calling for principal reductions:

“Prominent economists from both the left and the right” are calling for more principal reductions, Lippmann wrote in the letter. Borrowers are 1.7 times more likely to default again after a loan is reworked without cutting the balance, he said, citing a Deutsche Bank report last month.

If institutional investors want something, it is orders of magnitude more likely to happen than when regular people want it, so this is a good sign for Americans currently underwater on their homes.

The more we talk up plans to alleviate household debt, the more likely it is we’ll eventually see something substantial from Congress and the White House.