In the wake of the Occupy Wallstreet # Occupy Everything protests and sit-in, I'm reposting a solid article by Brian Holmes. Holmes, it seems, was perfectly timed in his analysis- just about one month after he wrote this, several people began to camp out on Wall Street in New York City. Now, weeks later, that camp out has spread like wild fire to dozens of financial districts around the nation- and the cries of protesters are now loud enough that mainstream has begun to take notice. I predict that this movement will continue to spread. The dissatisfaction of a nation starved for equality and true democracy- will not continue to wait.
Americans like to keep things simple and direct, so here it is: they rule. For the simple reason that they (the ruling class) have all the money. The top 5% of US citizens own almost 2/3 of the country’s wealth, or 63.5%. Compare that massive share to 12.8% for the bottom 80% — that is, “the rest of us,” as Rhonda Winter puts it in the excellent article from which this pie chart is taken.
Now go a little further, into the research she drew her chart from — a briefing paper of the Economic Policy Institute called “The State of Working America” — and you find that the top 1% holds over 1/3, or 35.6%, of the country’s net worth. Elsewhere, in The Nation, you will find such interesting tidbits as “In 2006, the top 0.01 percent averaged 976 times more income that America’s bottom 90%” — a thousand-fold gap between “them” and “the rest of us.”
click it for the big pictureThe whole point is, though, that very few people go any further, because very few people have any idea how unequal the United States has become. We are, apparently, a nation of idealists, which is a good thing. We are also, however, a nation of blind idealists, which is a pretty bad thing across the board. A couple of psychologists named Norton and Ariely did a study comparing people’s ideas of what inequality is and what it should be with the actual facts on the ground. Anyone interested in creating a more progressive political order should turn up the attention meter right here.
