Wealth Ineqaulity

Message Of Occupy Still Occupies The Public Dialogue

Staff for Popular Resistance - Anya Parampil of RT America covers the Occupy encampments history and legacy on the 4th anniversary of the movement. She describes how occupy grew from a small part in New York to a national and international movement. She describes how the Occupy raised long festering issues of the unfair economy and put them on the national agenda – and how the media reported on the spectacle of the encampments but missed the message of the movement. The impact of the movement was to have income inequality mentioned in political discussions more than ever before and the national dialogue being restricted around the corruption of Wall Street and the unfair economy. The Occupy opened the door to discussion of these issues in politics and it is hard to imagine the Bernie Sanders Campaign without Occupy having occurred. While the encampments are long gone the message of the movement occupies the United States today.

Newsletter – We Demand Accountability

April 18, 2015 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, www.PopularResistance.org Newsletter Banking, Climate Change, Corporatism, Corruption, Democracy, Empire, fast track, killed by police, Police abuse, Taxes, TPP, Wages, Wealth Ineqaulity, World Bank

On Tax Day, April 15, 61 year old Doug Hughes, a mailman from Florida, landed a gyrocopter on the Capitol lawn to deliver 535 letters to members of Congress in order “to spotlight corruption of Congress and to present a solution to legalized bribery.” Hughes told the Tampa Bay News that "I'd rather die in the flight than live to be 80 years old and see this country fall." He has been released on bond with home detention and returns to court on May 8th to face charges of operating an unregistered aircraft and violating restricted airspace, facing a total of four years incarceration. On Saturday, April 11, 22 year old Leo Thornton shot and killed himself in front of the Capitol. He had a sign taped to his hand that read, “Tax the 1%.” The media ignored him, some called him an extremist and did not report his "radical" message of fair taxes. Protests by individuals and groups become impactful when they ignite others to join, to mobilize in support of the call. We urge you to support protests by participating, spreading the word and mobilizing in whatever way you can.

How States Are Redistributing The Wealth

December 27, 2014 David Sirota, www.truthdig.com Educate! Law, Wealth Ineqaulity

In 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama was lambasted for supposedly endorsing policies of wealth redistribution. The right feared that under an Obama presidency, Washington would use federal power to take money from some Americans and give it to others. Yet, only a few years later, the most explicit examples of such redistribution are happening in the states, and often at the urging of Republicans. The most illustrative example began in 2012, when Kansas’ Republican Gov. Sam Brownback signed a landmark bill that delivered big tax cuts to high-income earners and businesses. Less than two years after that tax cut, the state’s income tax revenues plummeted by a quarter-billion dollars—and now Brownback is pushing to use money for public employees’ pensions to instead cover the state’s ensuing budget shortfalls.

Fear And Justice In The Battle For Mexico’s Future

November 23, 2014 Peter Stanchev, www.roarmag.org Educate! Mexico, Students, Violence, Wealth Ineqaulity

I woke up in fear, and for the rest of the day it controlled my life the way fear tends to control people’s lives. It dominated my thoughts the way it dominates people’s thoughts and actions, paralyzes them until they are deprived from all hope and the very basic human capacity to change the world around them. My fear was provoked by a nightmare, not one I saw in my dreams, but rather a nightmare I have been unfortunate enough to observe with my own eyes and come to know intimately. It was the fear of waking up and realizing my friends have disappeared at night; lifted from their beds by men in uniforms, leaving friends and family behind who from that day on can only guess after the fate of their loved ones. This fear is not imaginary. This is the fear I struggled to understand when talking to my friends and fellow students when I lived and studied in Mexico. It is a fear that is incomprehensible for someone who has not lived in a country where more than 100.000 have been killed and disappeared in less than ten years.

Plutocrats On The Defensive Against Social Justice Movements

October 25, 2014 Joshua Hoffman and Keyan Bliss, www.occupy.com Organize! Capitalism, Poverty, Wall Street, Wealth Ineqaulity

What is it like to be a billionaire in the United States? According to billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins, wealth is a burden made "unbearable" by people of lesser incomes when they demand equality. That was the narrative published by the corporate news machine at the Wall Street Journal. Taking time away from maintaining the world's largest luxury yacht, Perkins compared progressive movements seeking social and economic justice to the horrific persecution of Jews by Nazi Germany. Sensible people were quick to denounce such ludicrous comparisons with the Holocaust. But Perkins's fellow oligarchs continue endorsing the narrative of a "hard-working" class of wealthy people "under siege" by a "lazy" class of poor people. According to billionaires like Sam Zell and Wilbur Ross, they are being targeted by poor people jealous of what they have and incapable of working as hard as they do.

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