In 1984, one in five House members had zero or negative net worth excluding home equity, according to the disclosures; by 2009, that number had dropped to one in 12.

“For the 887 policy questions on which well-off and poor Americans disagreed by eight percentage points or more (top panel of figure 2), outcomes are fairly strongly related to the preferences of the well-to-do (b = 1.92, p = .000) but wholly unrelated to the preferences of the poor (b = 0.04, p = .92).”

There are many like it, but this one is mine.

My voice is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.

My voice, without me, is useless. Without my voice, I am useless. I must fire my voice true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will…

My voice and myself know that what counts in this war is not the rounds we fire, the noise of our burst, nor the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count. We will hit…

My voice is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will ever guard it against the ravages of weather and damage as I will ever guard my legs, my arms, my eyes and my heart against damage. I will keep my voice clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will…

Before God, I swear this creed. My voice and myself are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life.

So be it, until victory is America’s and there is no enemy, but peace!

jaseshort:

Declaration of the Occupation of New York City

Posted on September 30, 2011 by  NYCGA

This document was accepted by the NYC General Assembly on september 29, 2011

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As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what…

Me with my sign. :D

Not the most flattering picture of me, but I did it for equality, not vanity. 
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Lots of folks have been saying “WELL WHY AREN’T YOU IN MIDTOWN, THAT’S WHERE ALL THE MULTINATIONALS WENT, DON’TCHAKNOW?” Location doesn’t really matter. The target is the entire system for some of these folks protesting. The system that told them to go to college and do what they love, no matter what the cost, only to graduate and find an inhospitable job market. The system that destroyed dreams of home ownership and illegally forecloses on mortgages. The system that lays off people and destroys life savings of entire families. The very same system that was provided with unprecedented monetary support by our very government in order to prevent a larger economic collapse…a collapse that is slowly occurring irregardless. People SHOULD be questioning the fairness of a government that supports institutions like Bank of America, AIG, Bear Sterns, JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, and Citigroup while neglecting the needs of the citizens affected by their crimes.  

The only reason most people in America are “okay” with capitalism is that we have a government mandated safety net, there to protect the weakest and the poorest, created by the government policies of the very same man that I quoted, a man who was dealing with very similar enemies to the ones we have today. FDR understood that you cannot have an America that is solely focused on profit margins. (Greed has no logical endpoint; money can be amassed ad infinitum.) You cannot build your country’s economy on the backs of the people without giving them some margin of security, some way to cope with the inequality that is an integral part of any capitalist system. That is why you provide them with affordable health care, Social Security, public education, unemployment insurance and benefits, and so on. 

Now, the oligarchy is trying to cut it up, piece by piece, all for the sake of sparing “job creators”. What are the so-called “job creators” doing now? Probably sitting on fat wads of cash, complaining about how much they’re taxed already, while mentioning nothing about how they actually get most of their money (i.e. Capital gains). Probably waiting for Obama to be kicked out of office so they can push their agendas through Congress with nothing more than a weak-willed Democratic majority in the Senate to oppose them. 

I’m jobless. I have loans to be paid back. I accept some of the blame for the decisions that got me to this point. But even if I had a job, even if my loans had been paid in full, I’d still be protesting, because there are plenty of people that believe that the economic system in this country has turned against them. I seriously question whether its orientation was towards helping people in the first place! A corporation isn’t alive. It doesn’t breathe, eat, shit, piss, think, love, get sick, have children…it exists for one reason only: profit, and profit at any (human) cost. It is ludicrous to think for one second that it can or should be treated as an individual when it treats living, breathing individuals as nothing more than risky debt to be bought and sold in credit default swap schemes!

My friends and I are on Wall Street to make our presence known. That’s what matters; our beings and our words.

Hearts and minds.  

We marched. But no one had a clear sense of why. Nothing unifying anyway, besides our youthful exhuberance.

Edit:
Things seem to be heating up for those who stayed. It seemed like MAYBE people were trying to home in on a cohesive list of demands, so to speak.

They’re being censored on Twitter and other social media sites, so please, if you have any interest in what is being said or done by these young folks, SPREAD THE WORD.

https://occupywallst.org/ 

And not to toot my own horn here, but I participated in some pretty decent peaceful political protest today. Not a terribly gainful protest, mind you, unless you mean on a personal level. But there’s nothing quite like yelling at the top of your lungs in the middle of a Manhattan street!

Here are some of my demands:
- Revoke Corporate Personhood! (i.e. Citizen’s United vs. FEC)
- Eliminate indulgent corporate tax entitlements and loopholes that don’t spur hiring
- Reduce the festering gap between the rich and poor through a progressive revision of the tax code that makes the wealthiest individuals pay their fair share - (in a truly egalitarian society, the concept of a shared sacrifice should be noble, and not akin to robbery. when did we start putting the almightly dollar ahead of the sanctity of human life again? oh wait, we never stopped.)
- Stop government support of faulty economic institutions! 
- Incentivize and spur reinvestment in American infrastructure, and by extension, the American people!  (i.e. highways, educational systems, hospitals, etc.)