In 1933, Victor Serge was arrested by Stalin’s police, interrogated, and held in solitary confinement for more than eighty days. Released, he spent two years in exile in remote Orenburg. These experiences were the inspiration for Midnight in the Century, Serge’s searching novel about revolutionaries living in the shadow of Stalin’s betrayal of the revolution.

In 2008 artist and activist Jim Costanzo began appearing on Wall Street as the Aaron Burr Society, drawing upon a little-known figure from America's past as a way of critiquing and offering alternatives to the current dysfunctional capitalist system. The ABS distributed 100 one-dollar bills on Wall Street stamped with “Free Money” on one side and “Slave of New York” on the other. The Federal Reserve Bank was authorized to bail out Wall Street Banks with tax dollars from the 99% that was given as Free Money after the 2008 crash. Government deregulation and the subsequent corporate fraud caused the crash and resulted in people losing their jobs and homes.