Ten Occupy Wall Street Demonstrators in Ten Days: Tao

Day Nine in my Ten Occupy Wall Street Demonstrators in Ten Days series: Tao

Now in its fourth week, the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon continues to gain momentum nationwide. There’s been much talk about the ninety nine percent verses the top one percent. Yesterday Senior Editor of Mother Jones, Dave Gilson posted this chart on who the one percent are. Last night Rachel Maddow had an interview on her show with former Congressman, Alan Grayson about the growing Occupy Wall Street movement. When Ms. Maddow asked Grayson about why he thought the protests are resonating so much with people despite the campaign on the right to demonize the protestors and erroneously portray them as scary, Grayson responded: “I think that they have their eyes open and more and more people are seeing the scales fall from their eyes as well. Because the Occupy Wall Street people are saying first that there's no accountability on Wall Street. They wrecked our economy. Years ago they took a healthy economy and they gave us 9%, 10% or more unemployment and they destroyed 20% of our national wealth in the course of just 18 months from the middle of 2007 till the end of 2008. Destroyed 20% of our national wealth accumulated over the course of two centuries. And nobody's been prosecuted for it. Nobody’s been indicted nobody’s been convicted. So first there's no accountability. The second thing is that they've created a system that is enormously unequal and the result of that is that people are struggling to find a job to pay their bills, to pay their rent, to pay their credit card bills. According to wikipedia there are only five countries in the entire planet that are more unequal than the United States in the distribution of our wealth and that’s a system that Wall Street created, that Wall Street maintains, and that Wall Street enforces. And the way that they enforce it is the third gripe. The third gripe is that Wall Street controls and dominates our political system. One party is a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street and the other party caters to Wall Street all too much. So people have got into the situation right now where they feel that the system is completely unresponsive and they're driven deeper and deeper into debt and misery.”