Publictakeover's Weblog

The Street of Torments

Looking back on American history, it is surprising that it has taken the Occupy Wall Street movement so long to materialize as a backlash to the neoliberal globalization of our economy and the US military empire.

American history is paved with the struggles of working people seeking to build a just society in the wake or maw of the Great White Shark in lower Manhattan.

Attacks on the Stock Exchange, the “money trust” or the corporate elite have not always been as broad based in consensus or nonviolent as the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Insurgencies by industrial workers, powerful third-party threats to replace capitalism with something else, rallies and marches of the unemployed, and, yes, occupations, even seizures of private property, foreclosures forestalled by infuriated neighbors, and a pervasive sense that the old order needed burying had their lasting effect. In response, the New Deal attempted to unhorse those President Franklin Roosevelt termed “economic royalists,” who were growing rich off “other people’s money” while the country suffered its worst trauma since the Civil War. “The Street” trembled.

via Tomgram: Steve Fraser, The Street of Torments | TomDispatch.