Steve Fraser the US labor and economic historian and co-founder of the American Empire Project has put forward a modest proposal for the Occupy Wall Street Movement to consider in an Aljazeera publication. Premised on a famous essay from Jonathan Swift, “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”. Swift’s simple idea was “the starving Irish should sell their own children to the rich as food”. Fraser states, “The basic idea is that we offer ourselves up, 99% of us anyway, on the altar of high finance as a sacrifice to the bond markets.  It was Karl Marx who first observed that high finance is ‘the Vatican of capitalism’ … Anticipating Swift, we are already eating our own children or, at least, the futures available to them.”

 

Inspired by Steve Fraser http://ow.ly/82L9t image source facebook http://ow.ly/82Luc