RESISTANCE always ‘comes out of nowhere’ and establishments are always bewildered by it. Such was the case with the American civil rights movement, the May 1968 upheaval in France and the break-up of the Soviet bloc.

Just some weeks ago it looked like mighty financial players would get it all their own way, awarding trillions to banking malefactors and dispensing costs to everyone else — the old story of socialism for the wealthy and social Darwinism for the hapless hoi polloi.

This malevolent process has not been reversed (as yet) but the tiresome lies enabling it to go unchallenged no longer work as well as they used to. The Occupy Wall Street movement, long overdue, will not end until the fundamental problems that ignited it are corrected; and that awesome task will take a long and turbulent time.

This is the real thing, the eruption of an unstoppable counter-movement against shameless pro-wealthy policies promoted by both major American parties. The Republicans are hypocritical about, and the Democrats are hypnotised by, free-market rhetoric. Talk show pundits and news columnists in the US bluster away at the Occupy Wall Street movement because they heed only what their sleek paymasters think.

The remorseless squeeze that the economic system, rigged (more than usual) by the super-rich over decades, has inflicted on working people has reached the strangling point.

Even the slickest propaganda has its real world limits. You cannot get away with telling people who can’t afford to pay needlessly soaring bills that, in fact, they are doing well.

The opposition finally hit on a key crystallising slogan, compelling sound bites (reflecting some deeper critical thinking) and conjured up an organisational vehicle through which to fuse together the swelling discontent.

The much-mocked lack of leaders and the lack of a central manifesto of the movement is a great strength, especially in the early going when smug authorities unleash every dirty trick in their repertoire to derail this oncoming locomotive. This formidable anarchic movement is precisely the threat that right-wing billionaires contrived the Tea Party to divert popular energy from becoming. The Tea Partiers blindly blamed the state and refused to notice the privileged private powers that had captured that state.

Since the much-maligned 1960s, the high point of real wages, social benefits and civil rights, the right has connived in every well-funded way to cut salaries and the strip rights of the mid-level American of whatever their skin colour. Right-wingers hate the 1960s so much because it was a rare era when improving conditions fuelled mass demands for social justice at home and abroad.

The idolising of the ‘market’ since Ronald Reagan’s reign camouflaged corporate ploys to escape regulation and behave lawlessly. Pollute as you like, mistreat workers, rape natural resources, corrupt the political system — and do it all legally. There comes a point, beyond despair, where ordinary families cannot take it any more and find ways to fight to restore some semblance of decency, where a society redirects the wealth generated through collective labour for the common good.

The odious outcome of this four-decade squeeze, relieved only by easy credit, is destitution for tens of millions and gnawing insecurity for all but the top tier. The Great Recession, as Paul Krugman calls it, is not a ‘double-dip’ phenomenon. It never ended for the 99 per cent. The US would be in an endless 1930s-style Depression except for the few remaining props of welfare state measures that the right fights so fiercely and deviously to discard.

The right’s clichéd ideas are confetti. Republican candidates offer no plausible answers. The Tea Party is likely to lose swarms of its adherents as a genuine debate arises in the country over the causes of its woes. At a Chicago rally one of us spotted several signs that were Tea Party holdovers carried by folks who don’t understand how the economy really works but may be in for a useful education.

The recitation of calamities is, or ought to be, familiar. All productivity gains since 1971 were siphoned off by the top bracket. Had those gains been split according to the previous pattern, families would have at least $10,000 more to spend each year and there would be no excuse for cutting social programmes. The US government, hitherto guided by frothing free-marketers, devised a technique of practising Keynesianism exclusively for rich people via bailouts and quantitative easing, which hurts the rest of us by driving up prices during a severe economic downturn — which otherwise ought to be impossible.

A Wall Street acquaintance told us that his cronies knew the instant the government announced the first ‘quantitative easing’ cash avalanche that it would flow to Wall Street, which was the only mechanism that could handle influxes of that magnitude, which they would then nudge into commodities speculation to uphold the fortunes of the very people who crashed the economy.

The oil companies too restrict refinery capacity to boost prices, goad speculation and promise that they will hike prices at any sign of recovery. How many troops are being left behind to run Iraq and keep defence industries humming along after Obama ‘withdraws’? Big money abhors authentic democracy.

Obama’s 2008 election demobilised the very constituencies who would otherwise have applied pressure on the government to employ remedial policies. In the 1930s, ‘make me do it’ is what Franklin D. Roosevelt encouragingly dared popular organisations to do as he was assembling the New Deal that saved capitalism from itself. Unlike FDR, Obama does not care about people who lack connections and resources, and never really did, which does not mean he won’t respond if ample pressure builds.

Neither Obama nor Wall Street can talk their way out of this acute social crisis.

The writers are the authors of No Clean Hands.