Occupy Wall Street
The 1st Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America grants freedom of worship, speech & press; the right to petition the government & to assemble peaceably. The Occupy movement is not a peaceable assembly. The supposed 99% protest and disrupt productive Americans around the country. It is more accurate to identify the Occupiers as the 1%, not the 99%, as they represent the radical fringe of our society. They don't represent any responsible American from any political perspective. If they represent you, take a look in the mirror and reconsider.
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Class War? Not everyone hates the rich
6/10/12
Americans may dislike inequality, but they don't all blame the wealthy.
from Fortune Magazine
6/7/12

After the 1987 stock market crash, the New York Times offered up a page-one obituary for a "gilded, impudent age," quoting great minds who predicted the demise of unbridled self-interest in America. Three short years later, when a recession marked the official end of the '80s, commentators (including in this magazine) predicted a "brewing revolt against the rich" and the coming of a "post-affluent society."

It's instructive in 2012 -- when words like "tinderbox" and "explosive" dot so many descriptions of class relations in the U.S. -- to revisit those cloudy crystal balls of yore. As it turned out, there was no class revolt against the '80s, the "decade of greed." In the 1990s, McMansions sprouted like kudzu across the land, the rich got filthy rich, and all that supposed nascent populist anger was lost in a swirl of mortgage-financed consumer gluttony (behavior shared by the affluent and middle class alike).

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/07/rich-poor-wealth-gap/

... While Occupy Wall Street deserves credit for injecting discussion of economic inequality into the country's political bloodstream -- no small feat, it should be noted -- its calls for a "revolution" against a system that "impoverishes the 99%" hasn't exactly translated into a mass movement. And it remains unlikely to.

Historically Americans haven't shown much appetite for class strife. As professors Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs noted in their 2009 book Class War?: "While Americans are alert to inequality and support measures to reduce it ... they remain conservative by instinct ... Responsibility for an individual's economic position and life conditions rests chiefly with him- or herself."

Red More: Class Warfare?



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