The original Tea Party, remember, wasn’t directed just against the British redcoats. Colonial patriots also took aim at the East India Company. That was the joint-stock enterprise originally chartered by the first Queen Elizabeth. Over the years, the government granted them special rights and privileges, which the owners turned into a monopoly over trade, including tea.

It may seem a bit of a stretch from tea to credit default swaps, but the principle is the same: When enormous private wealth goes unchecked, regular folks get hurt — badly. That’s what happened in 2008 when the monied interests led us up the garden path to the great collapse.

So the Tea Party crowd should be demanding accountability from Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and scores of hedge funds and private equity firms that constitute what we loosely call Wall Street.

But are the culprits taking responsibility for devastating the lives of millions of ordinary Americans? Don’t kid yourself. If you’ve been watching them appear before congressional committees and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission — the independent inquiry that’s supposed to find out what really happened — you’ve no doubt been reaching for the Pepto-Bismol.

Here’s Robert Rubin, former treasury secretary and director of Citigroup, testifying last week: “Almost all of us involved in the financial system, including financial firms, regulators, ratings agencies, analysts and commentators, missed the powerful combination of forces at work and the serious possibility of a massive crisis. We all bear responsibility for not recognizing this, and I deeply regret that.”

OK, maybe you didn’t have a crystal ball. But what about good old-fashioned business sense? How could you make so much money and not know the score? “You are talking about a level of granularity no board will ever have,” Rubin claimed. Citi paid you $120 million as a senior advisor and rainmaker and you’re not responsible for knowing what’s happening below you? You didn’t bother to assess the risk you were peddling to clients?

The committee heard a similar alibi from Chuck Prince, who served as CEO of Citigroup during its meltdown: “Let me start by saying I’m sorry. I’m sorry that the financial crisis has had such a devastating impact on our country … And I’m sorry that our management team, starting with me, like so many others, could not see the unprecedented market collapse that lay before us.”

Commission chairman Phil Angelides, the former state treasurer of California, wasn’t buying it. “The two of you, in charge of this organization, did not seem to have a grip on what was happening,” he said, and to Rubin, “I don’t know that you can have it two ways: You were either pulling the levers or asleep at the switch.”

Nonetheless, the financiers wail, it was all an enormous accident, a once-in-a-century calamity, an act of God. But of course that’s not true. Lots of people saw it coming and made a bundle, taking off with the loot at the expense of the millions who lost their jobs, homes and savings. There’s no longer any question that many bankers continued to game the system after the collapse — still paying themselves exorbitant salaries and bonuses while hitting everyday people with usurious same-day paycheck loans, credit card fees and other charges — and refusing to help small and medium-sized businesses that could be creating employment.

The Tea Party gang really should have dropped by those Senate hearings this week looking into the failure of Washington Mutual, the bank that went belly up during the meltdown in September 2008 — the largest such failure in American history.

As an 18-month Senate investigation revealed, WaMu made subprime loans that its executives knew were rotten, then packaged them as mortgage securities and pawned them off on unsuspecting investors. Loan officers were paid by the number of mortgages they sold, and they ran up the numbers by lying to customers and falsifying data so they could make bigger bucks and win trips to Maui and the Caribbean. At one Washington Mutual office in Montebello, Calif., 83 percent of the housing loans contained bogus information.

Then there’s Lehman Brothers. Their misfortune, apart from some chicanery only now coming to light, was being small enough to fail. During those black September days two years ago, the feds decided it was expendable and let it go, leading to America’s biggest bankruptcy ever. In an admirable job of journalism this week, the New York Times reported that Lehman secretly controlled a company called Hudson Castle. Critics say it was used by Lehman to borrow money and to hide bad investments in commercial real estate and subprime mortgages.

But the week’s award for sheer gall goes to a Chicago-area hedge fund called Magnetar, named after a kind of neutron star that spews deadly radiation across the galaxies. Thanks to the teamwork of the investigative reporting Web site ProPublica, as well as public radio’s Planet Money project and “This American Life,” we learned that Magnetar worked with Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch and other investment banks to create toxic CDO’s — collateralized debt obligations — securities backed by subprime mortgages that management knew were bad. Then Magnetar took that knowledge and bet against the very same investments they had recommended to buyers, selling short and making a fortune.

To simply call all of this “creative accounting” is to do it an injustice. This is corruption, cynicism and greed on a scale that would make the Roman emperor Caligula cringe. Or rather, the emperor Nero. He didn’t just poison the citizens of Rome; legend has it that he burned the place down, fiddling around in the ashes, just like our Wall Street tycoons.

But since we know all this, why is it so hard to hold Wall Street accountable? Which brings us to what the Tea Party people should have been complaining about this week. The banking industry and corporate America are fighting against proposed financial reform with all the money and influence at their disposal, attempting to preserve a system that would enable them to ransack the country once again.

Look at Eric Lichtblau’s report this week, also in the New York Times, under the headline. “Lawmakers Regulate Banks, Then Flock to Them.” The financial services industry has hired more than 125 former members of Congress and congressional staffers from both parties to help them fight off accountability.

No wonder, too, that this headline appeared in the Times this week: “GOP Takes Aim at Plans to Curb Finance Industry.” That’s not surprising. Earlier this year Republican politicians told Wall Street: Give us the scratch and we’ll scrap reform.

The GOP’s SWAT team — also known as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — has already spent $3 million to try to kill or cripple a key part of reform — the proposed new Consumer Financial Protection Agency. With the chamber as their front, corporations have bankrolled ads that make it seem like the Red Army is at our doorstep.

Advocates for reform have countered with ads of their own, but Democrats are deep in hock to Wall Street, too. Remember the hedge fund Magnetar that bet against its own products? The owners covered their bets with ample campaign contributions to Rahm Emanuel. Yep, the same — President Obama’s White House chief of staff. At the time he was U.S. representative from Illinois and chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which collected millions of dollars from the financial services industry.

In fact, the Web site Politico.com reports that “the nation’s ten richest hedge fund managers have dumped nearly one million dollars into campaign accounts over the past several years … consumer advocates and critics from other financial sectors say hedge funds would get off pretty easily” under the Senate reform bill.

Bottom line: “The Wall Street banks are the new American oligarchy — a group that gains political power because of its economic power, and then uses that political power for its own benefit.” So write Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, and James Kwak, former management consultant and software entrepreneur, in their important new book, “13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown.”

Their words of warning and the past year and a half make you realize that as usual, Thomas Jefferson, whose birthday we celebrated this week, had it right. Back in 1816, he wrote, “I sincerely believe … that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.”

We sanctify his memory now, name streets and schools after him, made his birthday a national holiday. But in April 1968, as King walked out on that motel balcony, his reputation was under assault. The glory days of the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott and the 1963 March on Washington were behind him, his Nobel Peace Prize already in the past.

A year before, at Riverside Church in New York, he had spoken out — eloquently — against the war in Vietnam. King said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death,” a position that angered President Lyndon Johnson, many of King’s fellow civil rights leaders and influential newspapers. The Washington Post charged that King had, “diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people.”

With his popularity in decline, an exhausted, stressed and depressed Martin Luther King Jr. turned his attention to economic injustice. He reminded the country that his March on Washington five years earlier had not been for civil rights alone but “a campaign for jobs and income, because we felt that the economic question was the most crucial that black people and poor people, generally, were confronting.” Now, King was building what he called the Poor People’s Campaign to confront nationwide inequalities in jobs, pay and housing.

But he had to prove that he could still be an effective leader, and so he came to Memphis, in support of a strike by that city’s African-American garbage men. Eleven hundred sanitation workers had walked off the job after two had died in a tragic accident, crushed by a garbage truck’s compactor. The garbage men were fed up — treated with contempt as they performed a filthy and unrewarding job, paid so badly that 40 percent of them were on welfare, called “boy” by white supervisors. Their picket signs were simple and eloquent: “I AM A MAN.”

A few weeks into their strike, which had been met with opposition and violence, King arrived for meetings and addressed a rally. Ten days later, he returned to lead a march through the streets of Memphis that ended in smashed windows, gunshots and tear gas.

Upset by the violence, he came back to the city one more time to try to put things right. The night before his death, King made his famous “Mountaintop” speech, prophetically telling an audience, “Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!”

The next night he was dead. Twelve days later, the strike was settled, the garbage men’s union was recognized and the city of Memphis begrudgingly agreed to increase their pay, at first by a dime an hour, and later, an extra nickel.

That paltry sum would also be prophetic. All these decades later, little has changed when it comes to economic equality. If anything, the recent economic meltdown and recession have made the injustice of poverty even more profound, especially in a society where the top percentile enjoys undreamed of prosperity.

Unemployment among African-Americans is nearly double that of whites, according to the National Urban League’s latest State of Black America report. Black men and women in this country make 62 cents on the dollar earned by whites. Less than half of black and Hispanic families own homes and they are three times more likely to live below the poverty line.

The nonpartisan group United for a Fair Economy has issued a report that features Martin Luther King Jr. on the cover with the title “State of the Dream 2010: Drained.” King’s dream is in jeopardy, the report’s authors write, “The Great Recession has pulled the plug on communities of color, draining jobs and homes at alarming rates while exacerbating persistent inequalities of wealth and income.”

Nor will a recovery ameliorate the crisis. “A rising tide does not lift all boats,” United for a Fair Economy’s report goes on to say, “because the public policies, economic structures, and unwritten rules of racism form mountains and ridgelines, and hills and valleys that shape our economic landscape. As a result, a rising economic tide fills the rivers and reservoirs of some, while leaving others dry and parched.”

This is a perilous moment. The individualist, greed-driven free-market ideology that both our major parties have pursued is at odds with what most Americans really care about. Popular support for either party has struck bottom, as more and more agree that growing inequality is bad for the country, that corporations have too much power, that money in politics has corrupted out system, and that working families and poor communities need and deserve help because the free market has failed to generate shared prosperity – its famous unseen hand has become a closed fist..

It is hard to overstate the consequences of choosing more of the same — the very policies that have sundered our social contract. But hear the judgment of Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, echoing Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and martyrdom. “The vast inequalities of income weaken a society’s sense of mutual concern,” Arrow said. “… The sense that we are all members of the social order is vital to the meaning of civilization.”

Granted, there’s a gap here between the rhetoric and the reality. But there’s always been something askew about Nobel Peace Prize, in no small part because it’s given in the name of the man who invented dynamite, one of the most powerful and destructive weapons in the human arsenal.

It was rumored that after Alfred Nobel brought his version of Frankenstein’s creature into the world, he was torn by guilt, his shame said to have intensified when a French newspaper prematurely ran his obituary with the headline “The Merchant of Death Is Dead.” The article vilified him as a man “who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before.”

What’s more, until the end of his life he corresponded with a woman named Bertha von Suttner, who had briefly worked as his secretary. Many believe that Nobel was moved by a powerful antiwar book she had written titled “Lay Down Your Arms.” Whatever his reasons, when his will created the Nobel Prizes he specifically included among them a prize for peace. Von Suttner became one of its first recipients.

After Nobel’s death, events turned grim, as if to mock him further. The arms race exploded beyond anything he could have imagined. From the coupling of science and the military came ever more ingenious weapons of destruction that would take even more lives in ever more horrible ways.

One of the most insidious was the land mine, that small, explosive device filled with shrapnel that burns or blinds, maims or kills. Triggered by the touch of a foot or movement or even sound, more often than not it’s the innocent who are its victims — 75 to 80 percent of the time, in fact.

As a weapon, variations of land mines have been around since perhaps as early as the 13th century, but it was not until World War I that the technology was more or less perfected, if that can be said of weapons that mangle and mutilate the human body, and their use became common.

The United States has not actively used land mines since the first Gulf War in 1991, but we still possess some 10-15 million of them, making us the third-largest stockpiler in the world, behind China and Russia. Like those two countries, we have refused to sign an international agreement banning the manufacture, stockpiling and use of land mines. Since 1987, 156 other nations have signed it, including every country in NATO. Among that 156, more than 40 million mines have been destroyed.

Just days before Obama flew to Oslo to make his Nobel Peace Prize speech, an international summit conference was held in Cartagena, Colombia, to review the progress of the treaty. The United States sent representatives and the State Department says our government has begun a comprehensive review of its current policy.

Last year 5,000 people were killed or wounded by land mines, often placed in the ground years before, during wars long since over. They kill or blow away the limbs of a farmer or child as indiscriminately as they do a soldier. But still we refuse to sign, citing security commitments to our friends and allies, such as South Korea, where a million mines fill the demilitarized zone between it and North Korea.

Twelve years ago, at the time the treaty was first put into place, the Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and to Jody Williams, an activist from Vermont who believes that by organizing into a movement, ordinary people can matter. She proved it, despite the stubborn refusal of her own country’s government to do the right thing.

Last week, Williams condemned America’s continuing refusal to sign the treaty as “a slap in the face to land mine survivors, their families, and affected communities everywhere.”

The Nobel Committee said that part of the reason it was giving the Peace Prize to President Obama was for his respect of international law and his efforts at disarmament. And twice in his Nobel lecture, the president spoke of how often more civilians than soldiers die in a war. Then he said this:

“I believe that all nations, strong and weak alike, must adhere to standards that govern the use of force. I, like any head of state, reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation. Nevertheless, I am convinced that adhering to standards strengthens those who do, and isolates — and weakens — those who don’t.”

And still the land mine treaty goes unsigned by the government he leads. Go figure.

Dragged it kicking and screaming, for it was Justice who ordered Texas to integrate its public schools in 1971 — 17 years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision made separate schools for blacks and whites unconstitutional. Texas resisted doing the right thing for as long as it could. Many of its segregated schools for African-American children were so poor they still had outhouses instead of indoor plumbing.

This small-town lawyer appointed to the federal bench by President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered Texas to open its public housing to everyone, regardless of their skin color. He looked at the state’s “truly shocking conditions” in its juvenile detention system and said, Repair it. He struck down state law that permitted public schools to charge as much as a thousand dollars tuition for the children of illegal immigrants.

And Justice demanded a top-to-bottom overhaul of Texas prisons, some of the most brutal and corrupt in the nation. He even held the state in contempt of court when he thought it was dragging its feet cleaning up a system where thousands of inmates slept on the dirty bare floors of their cellblocks and often went without medical care. The late, great Molly Ivins said, “He brought the United States Constitution to Texas.”

Some say that justice stings. William Wayne Justice certainly did — and his detractors stung back with death threats and hate mail. Carpenters refused to repair his house; beauty parlors denied service to his wife. There were cross burnings and constant calls for his impeachment.

After he desegregated the schools he was offered armed guards for protection. He turned them down and instead took lessons in self-defense.

You need to understand that while so many Texans have fought and are fighting the good fight in the Judge Justice tradition, others believe in the law only when it sides with them. They long for the good old days of Judge Roy Bean, the saloonkeeper whose barroom court was known in the frontier days as “the law west of the Pecos.” His judicial philosophy was simple: “Hang ‘em first, try ‘em later.”

The present governor of Texas seems to be channeling Bean. During his nine years in office, Rick Perry — “Gov. Goodhair,” as Ivins called him — has presided over more than 200 executions, dwarfing the previous record of 152 set by his predecessor in the governor’s mansion, George W. Bush. (The most, it is said, of any U.S. governor in modern history.)

Lethal injection is practically a religious ritual in Texas. In fact, before their sentencing verdict that will send Khristian Oliver to die in just a couple of weeks — on Nov. 5, to be exact — jurors in the east Texas town of Nacogdoches consulted the Bible and found what they were looking for in the book of Numbers, where it reads, “The murderer shall surely be put to death,” and, “The revenger of blood himself shall slay the murderer.” Although it was noted that referencing holy writ was an inappropriate “external influence,” two appeals courts upheld the jury’s sentence and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

Perry will do almost anything to please the vengeful crowd in the Colosseum with their thumbs turned down. Did we mention that next year he’s up for reelection? When it turned out recently that five years ago the state may have executed a man for a crime he didn’t commit, Perry pulled some particularly shady moves.

In February 2004, Cameron Todd Willingham was put to death for allegedly setting a fire that killed his three young daughters. Perry has willfully ignored evidence from top arson investigators that the blaze was not homicide but an accident.

Now Perry has fired the chairman and three members of the state’s Forensic Science Commission just as they were about to hear further scientific testimony that might prove Willingham’s innocence. This week, Perry told reporters that the controversy is “nothing more than propaganda from the anti-death penalty people across the country.”

They can be short on mercy in Texas. All the more reason to mourn the loss of Justice — William Wayne Justice. Rest in peace, your honor.

If you’ve been watching the Senate Finance Committee’s markup sessions, maybe you’ve noticed a woman sitting behind Committee Chairman Max Baucus. Her name is Liz Fowler.

Fowler used to work for WellPoint, the largest health insurer in the country. She was its vice-president of public policy. Baucus’ office failed to mention this in the press release announcing her appointment as senior counsel in February 2008, even though it went on at length about her expertise in “healthcare policy.”

Now she’s working for the very committee with the most power to give her old company and the entire industry exactly what they want — higher profits — and no competition from alternative nonprofit coverage that could lower costs and premiums.

A veteran of the revolving door, Fowler had a previous stint working for Sen. Baucus — before her time at WellPoint. But wait, there’s more. The person who was Baucus’ top health advisor before he brought back Liz Fowler? Her name is Michelle Easton. And why did she leave the staff of the committee? To go to work — surprise — at a firm representing the same company for which Liz Fowler worked — WellPoint. As a lobbyist.

You can’t tell the players without a scorecard in the old Washington shell game. Lobbyist out, lobbyist in. It’s why they always win. They’ve been plowing this ground for years, but with the broad legislative agenda of the Obama White House — healthcare, energy, financial reform, the Employee Free Choice Act and more — the soil has never been so fertile.

The healthcare industry alone has six lobbyists for every member of Congress and more than 500 of them are former congressional staff members, according to the Public Accountability Initiative’s LittleSis database.

Just to be certain Congress sticks with the program, the industry has been showering megabucks all over Capitol Hill. From the beginning, they wanted to make sure that whatever bill comes out of the Finance Committee puts for-profit insurance companies first — by forcing the uninsured to buy medical policies from them. Money not only talks, it writes the prescriptions.

In just the last few months, the healthcare industry has spent $380 million on lobbying, advertising and campaign contributions. And — don’t bother holding onto your socks — a million and a half of it went to Finance Committee Chairman Baucus, the man who said he saw “a lot to like” in the two public option amendments proposed by Sens. Rockefeller and Schumer, but voted no anyway.

The people in favor of a public alternative can’t scrape up the millions of dollars Baucus has received from the health sector during his political career. In fact, over the last two decades, the current members of the entire finance committee have collected nearly $50 million from the health sector, a long-term investment that’s now paying off like a busted slot machine.

Not that we should be surprised. A century ago, muckraking journalists reported that large corporations and other wealthy interests virtually owned the United States Senate — using bribery, fraud and sometimes blackmail to get their way. Jokes were made about “the senator from Union Pacific” or “the senator from Standard Oil.”

One reporter in particular was out to break their grip. His name was David Graham Phillips. One day in 1906, readers of Cosmopolitan magazine opened its March issue to discover the first of nine articles by Phillips titled “The Treason of the Senate.”

He wrote, “Treason is a strong word, but not too strong, rather too weak, to characterize the situation which the Senate is the eager, resourceful, indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be, and vastly more dangerous: interests that manipulate the prosperity produced by all, so that it heaps up riches for the few; interests whose growth and power can only mean the degradation of the people, of the educated into sycophants, of the masses toward serfdom.”

The public outrage provoked by Phillips and other muckrakers contributed to the ratification of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, providing for the direct popular election of senators, who until then were elected by easily bought-off state legislators.

Of course, like water seeking its own level, big money finds its way around every obstacle, and was soon up to its old tricks, filling the pockets of sympathetic and grateful politicians.

Today, none dare call it treason. So why not call it what it is – a friendly takeover of government, a leveraged buyout of democracy.

Outrageous? You bet. But don’t just get mad. Get busy.