They couldn’t find someone to lead them in their frustration and anger; President Obama was unavailable. So they’ve taken to the streets themselves in cities across the country.

Occupy Wall Street is a protest not seen here since the 1960s, a seminal event devoid of the ’60s violence but equally intense. All that is missing are barricades and theme music from “Les Miserables.”

On the surface, the event is an attack on the imperious Wall Street banks. But to see it as nothing more would be to misread what’s been happening in Lower Manhattan and all those other cities.

This is a protest against the powerful — the corporate and political elite of the country — by people who feel maddeningly powerless, mere discards in an increasingly exploitative capitalist economy dominated by callous corporate giants.

The search is on now for what it all means, with no shortage of talking heads ready to explain it all. Odds are they haven’t a clue. Only the politicians seem mute on the meaning, which may be instructive since they’re part of the problem.

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Democrats, desperate for a lifeline, think it might signal the emergence of a left-wing tea party and fresh enthusiasm. But, ever in character, they don’t seem quite sure. Republicans, like their banker buddies and the financial press, are confident it will all blow over.

In truth, it’s hard to tell who’ll benefit politically, if anybody.

It is, in a sense, a rebuke of Obama, who’s viewed as mired in a fruitless search for bipartisan accord while the economy burns. (Somebody give the guy a fiddle). He has started to show the signs of fight, but he’s very late to the struggle.

But the protests are also a shot across the bow of a Republican Party seen by the demonstrators — and others, the polls say — as the tool of the same corporate crowd that exports jobs, corrupts Congress with carloads of cash and manipulates the tax code for its own advantage.

The Wall Street banks, though hardly the only villains and maybe not the worst, are a made-to-order symbol for the economic mischief that brought the country to this sorry state. They collapsed the economy in reckless, close-to-criminal practices that involved sale of investment instruments so worthless, some banks even bet against their own products.

When the crash came, they rushed to Washington to beg for government help. Remember Henry Paulson, the Bush treasury secretary, on bended knee begging Nancy Pelosi for bailout bucks? Once saved, these ingrates invested millions on lobbyists to fend off federal regulation. Gratitude is not part of a banker's DNA.

No one rationally opposes bank profitability; without adequate profit, they’d be unable to supply the credit essential to a market economy. But by the eve of the 2008 crash, bank profits had exploded, according to Simon Johnson, former economist for the International Monetary Fund — from 16 percent of all corporate profits to 41 percent by the mid-1990s, while pay for top executives had almost doubled.

Corporate greed isn’t confined to the banks, as the Institute for Policy Studies notes in its examination of something called, innocently enough, WIN America.

WIN America is a corporate campaign for a “tax holiday” on profits earned abroad — money, it argues, which, if brought home at a reduced tax rate, would create jobs here. Sounds good, until checked against the history of the last corporate “tax holiday” in 2004.

It cost the treasury $92 billion, the IPS contends, and instead of creating jobs, 58 of the corporate winners “shed almost 600,000 jobs after their tax holiday tax break.” Who’d have guessed?

The Wall Street protests are welcome events, a Howard Beale-type cry that “we’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.” After all, this is the Year of the Common Man; even the Arabs are in revolt.

But what the demonstrators want — an end to the perversion of our politics by big money — is a cure that can’t be made any time soon, and certainly not by just reining in the banks and corporations.

The root of the problem is the U.S. Supreme Court. In a truly stupefying decision, it opened wide the floodgates to political money by ruling that money has free speech rights in politics — almost no holds barred — and that corporations are individuals. Only a change in the court can cure that malady.