It doesn’t feature in the coverage of the presidential election, but there is a radical seam that runs through US history. Here we run extracts from a new book, Voices of a People’s History of the United States, edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, which brings together voices of protest and resistance from the 15th century to todayMary Elizabeth Lease
Wall Street owns the countryMary Lease was one of the leaders of the Populist movement that brought together poor farmers to fight the banks that were repossessing their farms.
THIS IS a nation of inconsistencies. The Puritans fleeing from oppression became oppressors. We fought England for our liberty and put chains on four million blacks.
We wiped out slavery and our tariff laws, and national banks began a system of white wage slavery worse than the first. Wall Street owns the country.
It is no longer a government of the people, by the people and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street and for Wall Street.
The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master.
Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags.
The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us. The politicians said we suffered from overproduction.
Overproduction, when 10,000 little children, so statistics tell us, starve to death every year in the United States, and over 100,000 shopgirls in New York are forced to sell their virtue for bread.
We will stand by our homes and stay by our fireside by force if necessary, and we will not pay our debts to the loanshark companies until the government pays its debts to us.
The people are at bay—let the bloodhounds of money who dogged us thus far beware.
c1890
continued..http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php4?article_id=3150
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