Since the time of President Reagan, the richest one percent of the country has seen exponential income growth. Everyone else, including the people who most need to have their incomes grow, have not done nearly so well. The main reason for that is tax policy[.]
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Scott Olsen, a protester who’s done two tours of duty in Iraq and is now involved in Veterans For Peace, was critically wounded during an Oakland police raid by police projectiles. When people tried to help him, an officer lobbed a flash bang grenade right into their group. Olsen is currently hospitalized with serious injuries and is reported to be in critical condition.
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Wow, what a loss that would be, a protest free of hypocrisy, hate, and bigotry.
As the chart at right shows, between 1979 and 2007, the share of after-tax income going to each of the bottom four income quintiles–the bottom 80 percent–has dropped. The only quintile that has increased its share is the top 20 percent. And the top 1 percent has more than doubled its share
. . . The Occupy Wall Street movement has made inequality [emphasis added] a key focus of its protests, and has used the slogan, “We are the 99 percent.”
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Watch from time-hack 13:50 – 20:15
If you want to get some idea of why the 99 per cent movement has attracted so much support in the US, just take a look at this graph. Over the last thirty years, the share of income taken by the top 1 per cent of Americans has risen from 10 per cent to 23.5 per cent . . . As you’ll notice, from the 1950s onwards, income distribution in the US remained broadly stable until the Thatcher-Reagan revolution. The neoliberal policies pursued by the Reagan administration – tax cuts for the wealthy (the top rate of tax was reduced from 50 per cent to 28 per cent), deregulation and privatisation, led to a dramatic rise in inequality.
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Sean Faircloth, Director of Strategy and Policy for the US branch of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, discusses his new book, Attack of the Theocrats: How the Religious Right Harms Us All—and What We Can Do About It, which examines the crumbling of the United States’ most cherished founding principle—the wall of separation between church and state—and offers a specific and sensible plan for rebuilding the church-state wall. The book also names The Fundamentalist Fifty, current members of Congress who have made some of the most extreme theocratic statements. If they weren’t so scary, they’d be funny.
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Always Question Authority 