[Marxism] The specter of Wall Street

[Louis Proyect]

The Specter of Wall Street
Wall Street's Comeback as the Place Americans Love to Hate
By Steve Fraser

Wall Street sits at the eye of a political hurricane. Its enemies 
converge from every point on the compass. What a stunning turn of events.

For well more than half a century Wall Street has enjoyed a remarkable 
political immunity, but matters were not always like that. Now, with 
history marching forward in seven league boots, we are about to revisit 
a time when the Street functioned as the country's lightning rod, 
attracting its deepest animosities and most passionate desires for 
economic justice and democracy.

For the better part of a century, from the 1870s through the tumultuous 
years of the Great Depression and the New Deal, the specter of Wall 
Street haunted the popular political imagination. For Populists it was 
the "Great Satan," its stranglehold over the country's credit system 
being held responsible for driving the family farmer to the edge of 
extinction and beyond.

For legions mobilized in the anti-monopoly movement, Wall Street was the 
prime engine house of monopoly capitalism, leaving behind it a trail of 
victimized businesses, consumers, captive municipalities, and crushed 
workers. For Progressive reformers around the turn of the twentieth 
century, Wall Street's "money trust" was the mother of all trusts, its 
tentacles -- and the octopus was indeed a popular image of the time -- 
choking off economic opportunity for all but a favored few. Its 
political power in Congress, in presidential cabinets, in statehouses, 
in both major political parties was seen as so overwhelming as to 
threaten to suffocate democracy itself.

All the periodic panics and depressions -- 1873, 1884, 1893, 1907, and 
1913 -- that, with numbing regularity, punctuated economic life until 
the Crash of '29 and the Great Depression brought the house down seemed 
to begin on the Street. And whether they actually began there or not, 
all the misery that followed in their wake -- the homelessness, the 
armies of tramps and hobos, the starvation, the bankruptcies, the broken 
families, the crushing sense of dispossession -- was regularly laid at 
the feet of the Street.

Despite the hot-tempered invective directed its way, the "Great Satan" 
didn't face its comeuppance until the New Deal in the 1930s. Then, all 
its transgressions -- its speculative greed, its felonious 
insider-dealing, its cynical manipulation of popular credulity, its 
extravagant incompetence and seemingly limitless capacity for 
self-delusion -- left Wall Street truly vulnerable. Its reputation had 
struck bottom.

full: 
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174984/steve_fraser_wall_street_and_the_return_of_the_repressed