A year ago this week, the original Occupy Wall Street camp in Zuccotti Park was evicted. The camps served as a focal point for a vibrant protest movement that shook up the country, but they galvanized the anger and fear of working people around the country, struggling to make it through the Great Recession.

The mainstream press often did its best to portray the movement as simply a bunch of unwashed kids without a message, without demands. Yet if one ever doubted that the movement’s message got through, the collection of letters in The Trouble is the Banks, from Occupy the Boardroom and n+1 serves as proof.

Actively helping people is fun. Coping with power structures directly isn’t.

One of the bigger problems in US politics is the relationship between money and power. Just as big a problem, in many ways, is the difficulty that comes with organizing traditionally marginalized groups. It’s hard to organize the jobless, for example, or the poor, because of their transient nature and focus on survival rather than politics.

But thanks to the collapse of the housing bubble, we now have a large constituency that is more definable and able to be mobilized. That would be the nearly 16 million American homeowners who are underwater, who owe more on their homes than what the homes are worth.