When banks compete against teachers, you lose

Boy. some people really hate those "Star Wars" prequels with Jar Jar Binks...what? Oh, the signs says "Make Banks Pay," not "Binks"? Nevermind. Anyway, it seems that what's really happened here is that the Right declared war on the teachers union, and so the teachers union responded by declaring war on the banks. (Isn't that how World War I started?)

Some attendees view the budget cuts as a first shot in a much larger cultural conflict between the wealthy ruling elites and working class people. Mike Fox, a teacher at a Brooklyn charter school, believes the cuts and layoffs are the start of a class war. "It's anti-city worker, so I'm here not just as a teacher, but for sanitation workers, policemen, firemen, all of the people who make the city work," he said.

As for sharing the burden, Fox said he doesn't see people other than the poor sacrificing, and Bloomberg is playing too nice with the corporations on Wall Street when he should be demanding they contribute fairly to society.

It's funny that now people take to the streets of the Financial District, nearly three years after Wall Street almost destroyed the country. People should have been out protesting the lack of accountability, the lack of jail time for the major fraudsters, and the toxic mix of obscene bonuses and low taxes on the wealthy long before this. Instead, it took an assault on teachers and their paychecks to motivate action. The regular folks are caught in the middle: In a perfect world we'd see justice against the fraudsters, the wealthy paying their fair share, and leaders and teachers working together instead of against each other, to make schools better for the kids.

This is not a perfect world.