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Steve Fraser
Steve Fraser is an historian, editor, writer, and TomDispatch regular. His new book is The Limousine Liberal: How an Incendiary Image United the Right and Fractured America (Basic Books). His previous books include The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power, Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life, and Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace. He is the co-founder of the American Empire Project.
Articles by this author
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Views Thursday, June 02, 2016 Bernie, The Donald, and the Sins of Liberalism Arising from the shadows of the American repressed, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have been sending chills through the corridors of establishment power. Who would have thunk it? Two men, both outliers, though in starkly different ways, seem to be leading rebellions against the masters of our fate... Read more |
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Views Friday, April 03, 2015 Plutocracy The First Time Around [ The following passages are excerpted and slightly adapted from Fraser's new book, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (Little, Brown and Company). ] Part 1: The Great Upheaval What came to be known as the Great Upheaval, the movement... Read more |
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Views Thursday, September 11, 2014 The Rebirth of Family Capitalism George Baer was a railroad and coal mining magnate at the turn of the twentieth century. Amid a violent and protracted strike that shut down much of the country’s anthracite coal industry, Baer defied President Teddy Roosevelt’s appeal to arbitrate the issues at stake, saying, “The rights and... Read more |
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Views Thursday, April 04, 2013 Making Disaster Pay In 2007, a financial firestorm ravaged Wall Street and the rest of the country. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy obliterated a substantial chunk of the Atlantic seaboard. We think of the first as a man-made calamity, the second as the malignant innocence of nature. But neither the notion of a man-made nor natural disaster quite captures how the power of a few and the vulnerability of the many determine what is really going on at ground level. Causes and consequences, who gets blamed and who leaves the scene permanently scarred, who goes down and who emerges better positioned Read more |
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Views Tuesday, January 29, 2013 The Politics of Debt in America: From Debtor’s Prison to Debtor Nation [ This essay will appear in the next issue of Jacobin . It is posted at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of that magazine, and re-posted at Common Dreams with subsequent permission. ] Read more |
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Views Monday, December 03, 2012 Debtpocalypse, Austerity and the Hollowing Out of America “ Debtpocalypse ” looms. Depending on who wins out in Washington, we’re told , we will either free fall over the fiscal cliff or take a terrifying slide to the pit at the bottom.&nb Read more |
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Views Thursday, April 19, 2012 Locking Down an American Workforce in the Prison-Corporate Complex Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. Read more |
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Views Tuesday, November 29, 2011 Take Our Children, Please! A Modest Proposal for Occupy Wall Street In 1729, when Ireland had fallen into a state of utter destitution at the hands of its British landlords, Jonathan Swift published a famous essay , “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being A Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public.” His idea was simple: the starving Irish should sell their own children to the rich as food. Read more |
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Views Thursday, October 13, 2011 The All-American Occupation: A Century of Our Streets Vs. Wall Street Occupy Wall Street, the ongoing demonstration-cum-sleep-in that began a month ago not far from the New York Stock Exchange and has since spread like wildfire to cities around the country, may be a game-changer. If so, it couldn’t be more appropriate or more in the American grain that, when the game changed, Wall Street was directly in the sights of the protesters. Read more |
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Views Monday, September 12, 2011 Message to the Unemployed: Uncle Sam Does(n’t) Want You Not long ago, the city council of Ventura, California, passed an ordinance making it legal for the unemployed and homeless to sleep in their cars. At the height of the Great Recession of 2008, one third of the capital equipment of the American economy lay idle. Of the women and men idled along with that equipment, only 37% got a government unemployment check and that check, on average, represented only 35% of their weekly wages. Read more |