Soraya Chemaly: Women Own 1% of the World's Property -- Occupy That. It must be what they're wearing. 1% One Percent. O.N.E. P.E.R.C.E.N.T. That's the number between ZERO and TWO. There must be a good reason for this startling fact. Nah! But, maybe it's because girls and women: Don't get to go to school when their brothers do Get married off (don't worry, at a good price) Are deprived of food when it's scarce Aren't allowed to own anything themselves Don't inherit Aren't paid for their labor Are property.
How much poorer do we want women to get in the world? If you doubt what I'm saying just because you have to then look at Half The Sky, or We Are Equals or The Girl Effect or any number of readily available sources. I know, I know, Oprah and the Queen are both on the Forbes List. But there are several lists, one for Women and another for the real people (there is no "Richest Men's List"), which is just called the Forbes Rich List. Which goes to show, money isn't everything. And we, men and women both, get to live with that. How Wall Street Occupied America. This article is adapted from a speech Bill Moyers gave in October at Public Citizen’s fortieth-anniversary gala. During the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains in 1890, populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease exclaimed, “Wall Street owns the country….
Money rules…. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us. " She should see us now. That’s now the norm, and they get away with it. Let’s name this for what it is: hypocrisy made worse, the further perversion of democracy. Why New York’s Zuccotti Park is filled with people is no mystery. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, historian Gordon Wood says that our nation discovered its greatness “by creating a prosperous free society belonging to obscure people with their workaday concerns and pecuniary pursuits of happiness.”
Those words moved me when I read them. They chose swiftly. Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don't get it. (CNN) -- Like the spokesmen for Arab dictators feigning bewilderment over protesters' demands, mainstream television news reporters finally training their attention on the growing Occupy Wall Street protest movement seem determined to cast it as the random, silly blather of an ungrateful and lazy generation of weirdos. They couldn't be more wrong and, as time will tell, may eventually be forced to accept the inevitability of their own obsolescence.
Consider how CNN anchor Erin Burnett, covered the goings on at Zuccotti Park downtown, where the protesters are encamped, in a segment called "Seriously?! " "What are they protesting? " she asked, "nobody seems to know. " Like Jay Leno testing random mall patrons on American History, the main objective seemed to be to prove that the protesters didn't, for example, know that the U.S. government has been reimbursed for the bank bailouts.
It was condescending and reductionist. Occupy Reality - Transcript. People have been asking for a transcript of the little speech I gave at Occupy Wall Street on Wenesday November 9. It amounts to a one-page summary of my book Life Inc. (In other words, if you wonder how any of this could be true, read the book for the full story and documentation. I won't argue it out here.) My name is Douglas RushkoffI am humbled and honored to be amplified by your voices. You are not fighting against people, but against a machine.It was put in place over 500 years ago.By a wealthy elite - trying to repress a booming peer to peer economy.Those people are all dead, but their program lives on. They invented an operating system called central currency. People who used to trade directly, were now forced to borrow money from the king's bank.At interest. The elite also invented software for that operating system.It was called the chartered monopoly.
It is a program designed to extract value. Too many are mistaking this operating system - for the way things are. Why many back Occupy Wall Street. Citigroup is lucky that Moammar Gadhafi was killed when he was. The Libyan leader's death diverted attention from a lethal article involving Citigroup that deserved more attention because it helps to explain why many average Americans have expressed support for the Occupy Wall Street movement. The news was that Citigroup had to pay a $285 million fine to settle a case in which, with one hand, Citibank sold a package of toxic mortgage-backed securities to unsuspecting customers - securities that it knew were likely to go bust - and, with the other hand, shorted the same securities - that is, bet millions of dollars that they would go bust.
It doesn't get any more immoral than this. "The deal became largely worthless within months of its creation," The Journal added. Citigroup, which is under new and better management now, settled the case without admitting or denying any wrongdoing. This gets to the core of why all the anti-Wall Street groups around the globe are resonating. Panic of the Plutocrats.