First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Working class Americans are waking up. They’re marching in the streets and joining protests. The government has pampered the rich for long enough. The people that caused the financial crisis should be on trial, not rewarded with bailouts and tax breaks. Protestors are demanding social justice.
The financial elite have been eroding the working class for decades. The economic top one percent of the population now owns over 70% of all financial assets, an all time record. Tax rates for the wealthy are the lowest they’ve been since the 1950s and now CEO pay is between 250 and 500 times that of the average worker.
You have corporations like General Electric, ExxonMobil, Dupont, Wells Fargo, and Verizon (among others) that actually pay a negative tax rate despite making billions in profit. If those companies would have been taxed at a 35% rate the income from corporate taxes would have been 12 percent higher. A majority of Americans want the tax rates to increase for the rich. They’ve realized that trickle down economics is a sham. As tax rates have decreased the gap between the rich and poor has grown astronomically. Now the income disparity is the largest it has been since the census started collecting information about income.
The political and financial elite have been scrambling to ostracize and marginalize these protestors. The corporate media has mocked the protestors using Apple devices and Facebook as a way to organize. Pundits have attacked their appearance and even the fact that they’re at a protest instead of working. If they can’t be ignored they have to be ostracized to protect the status quo.
The internet has been the key component in the spread of information and the organization of these protests. People are waking up to the class warfare that has been going on for decades and Occupy Wall Street is now too big to ignore. If Occupy Wall Street is so wrong, what are the financial elite so worried about?
