"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?
The Mad Hatter
The Top 1 Percent Are Taking In More Of The Nation's Income Than At Any Other Time Since The 1920s: Not only are the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans taking home a tremendous portion of the national income, but their share of this income is greater than at any other time since the Great Depression
There comes a time in each generation when you can continue with the status quo and watch as the weak, the poor, the disabled and disenfranchised are pushed farther and farther down until they are out of sight and out of mind, or get into the game and change it. There are far too many people in this country who care, whose conscience will not let them join the rich and privileged in the rape and pillage of our planet and the added misery of the less fortunate.
It happened in the 60's at the end of the Eisenhower era, when people with their suits and hats and cookie cutter houses were suddenly turned onto, "turn on, tune in and dropout". When a new, young and vital president came into office at such a pivotal time in our history that the next twenty years changed the the very tone of how everyone in the industrialized world interacted. Where a new sound in music changed a generation and new blood in government changed the lives of a whole race of people with the Civil Rights Act.
A time when kids burnt their draft cards, grew their hair long and defied Herbert Hoover and the rest of a generation whose time was over. Who refused to go half way around the world to fight a people they didn't even know existed until Johnson and company staged the Gulf of Tonkin incident and increased our presence in a country that the French were more than happy to get the hell out of and our military was more than happy to oblige. The Vietcong were not going just to set there and let foreigners occupy their country, no more than we world.
That generation stopped a war and made a president so paranoid he made an enemies list they led to break-ins and cover-ups and the resignation of the highest elected official in our nation's history. Now, we are again at a pivotal time where the top 1% own 42% of the wealth of this nation and 99 % of the people get the leftovers. They have broken the laws and cheated the middle class and poor out of everything we own and it is now time in history for another generation to step up.
For over ten years we have been at war against a people who had nothing to do with 9-11 and have killed hundreds of thousands of people while losing thousands. Tens of thousands have lost limbs and hundreds of thousands have PTSD. We have also wasted over a trillion dollars of our national treasure. I've sat back and have written time and time again about when are our young going to come out from the shadows and stop these wars. Well, they may be doing it for greed, but they are finally coming out and if it reigns in the rich and stops the wars, I really don't care why they are protesting.
"You are right to be indignant. The fact is the system is not working right. It is not right that we have so many people without jobs when we have so many needs that we have to fulfill. It's not right that we are throwing people out of their houses when we have so many homeless people.
"Our financial markets have an important role to play. They're supposed to allocate capital, manage risks. But they misallocated capital, and they created risk. We are bearing the cost of their misdeeds. There's a system where we've socialized losses and privatized gains. That's not capitalism; that's not a market economy. That's a distorted economy, and if we continue with that, we won't succeed in growing, and we won't succeed in creating a just society".
With the protestors , many dressed as zombies, marching down Wall Street chanting "Big Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Left Behind", a Rasmussen Report said 79% of all Americans agree that the middle class got left behind. If the middle class were left behind, and the rich want to cut the entitlements to the poor, again, what else can 99% of the population give up. The poor are already giving their blood, their limbs and their lives fighting these insane wars.
People who are against these protests say that the protestors don't even know what they are protesting about. They are wrong. It's like a death by a thousand cuts that has built up over the last ten years and has finally risen to the top, with nowhere else to go. Something had to give and fortunately the young, and now the middle-aged unemployed and people who are just disgusted are back in the street. Sure, there may not be one major cause, but it all breaks down to one thing. When 1% of the people own 42% of the wealth, then 99% of the poor are lucky to just get a piece of the government cheese. March On, Brothers~~
