looking on...how do people in the good ol' US see the 1862 Homestead Act fitting into all of this. I read Goodwyn's Democratic Promise in the late 90s and it really inspired me. However it seems that most of the farmers of the South were getting screwed by the railway monopolies and so began to think outside the box to create alternative solutions. Perhaps an analogy with Occupy would be relevant here. So if history rhymes, perhaps a new People's Party might be just around the corner (to stop some witty person...I'll point out now that if history does rhyme then we'll probably get a Sheeple's Party instead). Don't know why I said we...oh well, we're all Americans now! Railroad finance in the late 19th century presaged the type of crisis capitalism we see today. The overexpansion of railroads led to the Panic of 1893 and a 7-year depression, when oligarchs exploited widespread failure to pick up the pieces and consolidated their power. The most insightful contemporary observer of that phenomenon was John Moody, who went on to invent the modern credit rating system. In his seminal work, The Truth About Trusts, he wrote that the largest and most of important of all Trusts, the Railroad Trust, was controlled by five men. "Rockefeller, Morgan, Harriman, Gould, Vanderbilt, are interested in and more or less dominate all the groups," he wrote. "And in this way knit together the entire railroad system of the country into this greater community or Trust." also,