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Occupy Wall Street Equality

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Three years after the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. economy remained a mess, leaving millions out of work. The housing market was struggling for a recovery three years after the 2008 financial crisis, and foreclosures increased. Occupy Wall Street arose in response to the ordinary people who are getting battered by economic forces beyond their control, while elites in the private and public sector prosper. In this paper, I will examine Occupy Wall Street’s confrontation of the U.S. wealth gap and its actions, participants and its attempt to encourage equality. (2) Occupy Wall Street, also known as OWS, is a leaderless resistance movement. It includes people of many genders, colors and political point of views. The majority of the protesters …show more content…

After posting its call to action, Adbusters sent word to its email distribution list and created a Facebook event, mobilizing a pre-existing network of followers. As one of the largest privately owned public spaces online, Facebook became a key platform for the Occupy movement. Facebook profiles such as OccupyWallSt.Gilded.Age and OccupyTogether, created in the weeks leading up to the first protest, provided broadly accessible channels for information. During the groundwork phase, organizers also used open-source web-coding tools to create dedicated Occupy websites. The most important were Occupywallst.org, and the blog Occupytogether.org. These sites combined newsfeeds and social media links with manifestos, videos, crowd maps and other resources, and they linked together other sites to create a sprawling landscape of information. . But it was the Adbusters blog post that gave the action a name and date. It also gave them #occupywallstreet, the first of thousands of #Occupy hashtags that enabled the spontaneous assembly of strangers on Twitter and other internet platforms. Activity increased in September, and by the day of occupation, Twitter …show more content…

The rich still remains to possess wealth and power while the poor, even with all the effort and hard work still remains where they are. Some recent study stated that the widening economic gap occurring between the rich and the poor along with the involved power and wealth is due to the great recession. According to the data presented for the Distribution of Financial Wealth and Net Worth, the top 1% rose and added 8.5% on their level of income and power from 1982 to 2006. The bottom 80%, from having 48.1% level of income and power, it decreased to 40.1%. Considering the recession that was said to be the reason for the widening gap between the poor and rich, it seems that the ones more affected were the poor. The top 1%, although they are experiencing some changes due to recession, it still did not led them to experience what the remaining percentage of the population are enduring, and as what was shown, they just got wealthier throughout the past

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Wealth has formed an enormous gap in the society. As a country, the people are as separated as oil and water. “The wealthy class is becoming more wealthy; but the poorer class is becoming more dependent. Social contrasts are becoming sharper” (Doc A), to distinguish the poor from the rich has become extremely effortless.

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As McAdam and Kloos write, “the country is now more starkly divided in political terms than at any time since the end of Reconstruction and more unequal in material terms than roughly a century ago and greater, even, than on the eve of the Great Depression” (McAdam and Kloos 4). An increase in inequality has only given rise to protest groups such as Occupy Wall St that protested the rising inequality between the 1%

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The root of the inequality issue lies in the government policies, as they hold the power to determine where the money lies on the spectrum of the rich, middle class and the poor. Normally, when an economy is suffering, employment as well as wages adjust accordingly and sales as well as profits suffer as well. However, because of this inequality employment rates and wages actually suffer while the sales profit. Political forces, as much as economic ones are what leads to inequality. As the government controls the distribution of sources as well the distribution of income that comes from a market.

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“The policies of the Reagan and first Bush administrations, which openly favored the rich, abetted a secular trend already in motion, causing inequality to increase measurably between 1981 and 1992.” (Loewen, 215) The wealthy already had their advantage when they gained their wealth. The wealth they had helped greatly in the process

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Then we come to the next five percent fractile; they controlled just 0.7% of the yearly average wealth from the years 1967-1970. Finally, we get to the lowly bottom ninety percent fractile; they had a meger 0.07% of the yearly average wealth from the years 1967-1970. Which made the wealth inequality ratio between the top one-hundredth percent fractile and bottom ninety percent fractile from the years 1967-1970 69,716:71. In other words, the top one-hundredth percent fractile controlled $69,716 of the yearly average wealth for every $71 of the yearly average wealth the bottom ninety percent fractile controlled for the years 1967-1970. That ratio, still very lopsided, was infinitely more equal than the wealth inequality ratio between the top one-hundredth percent fractile and the bottom ninety percent fractile before the great depression ( 356,900:100), or even worse, the wealth inequality ratio between the same two groups before the great recession (301,932:113) (Duménil, Gérard).

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Then, in 2016, the earth shifted beneath our feet. The rebellion started as a quiet protest, spoken by families of all colors and creeds — families who just wanted a fair shot for their children, and a fair hearing for their concerns. But then the quiet voices became a loud chorus — as thousands of citizens now spoke out together, from cities small and large, all across our country.

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Rich people, play a prime role in the crisis with the fact that they get taxed the least, but if their taxes were to increase it would make a make the most

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Believing, only 1% of the world’s population possesses the majority of the wealth around the world and is therefore able to dictate the state of the global economy. The result is an unbalanced and stagnate situation for any individuals looking to improve their station in life. The cost of living and minimum wage are disproportionate to one another with the minimum wage rising at an exponentially smaller rate than the cost of living. Senator Baldwin stated, “We know that because of this loophole that the are many hedge fund and Wall Street millionaires that pay a lower tax rate than truck drivers, nurses, and teachers” (Washington Post). Occupy Wall Street is a subset of the global occupy movement, which most notably attempts to use occupation as its main method of protest.

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The rise of the working man saw the share of national income going to the top 1% decrease from 24% to around 10% as they failed to recover fully from the great depression and became swamped by an increasing number of government taxes (McQuaig & Brooks, 2010, p.54). Consequently, the rise of wages and workers’ rights, coinciding with heavier taxation to the rich, led to greater equity in income

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The middle class want to become rich and the low class only wants equality.” Orwell’s predictions of the party, the government in modern society, rises to power and the poor stay poor. In LA Times “Income Inequality makes the rich more scrooge-like, study finds”, “Since the 1980’s -- the end of a 30-year period… wealth has grown increasingly concentrated at the top of the economic ladder, while low-income Americans have commanded a smaller and smaller share of the nation’s wealth.” *add where quote is from* ”... top 5 percent of American families saw their real income increase 74.9 percent… the lowest-income fifth saw a decrease in real income of 12.1 percent… Sharply contrasting with the 1947-79 period… with the lowest income group actually seeing the largest gains.”

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What’s more, specifically, the rich have gotten a lot richer. Almost everybody who talk about it says that economic inequality must be reduced. There a few causes to the wealth gap that are easily determined, examples are corporations that partake in the following actions: gender, unfair exchange, cheap labor elsewhere and other benefactors. Other causes include education and the differentiated amounts of taxes paid by Americans in different economic levels.

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1309 Words | 6 Pages

Rather than examining the costs the movement, focused on the preferences in society (McCarthy and Zald, 2003), as the growing case of income inequality had caused people to seek change. Occupy used the internet to coordinate events and connect the movements globally. Hashtags such as “#Occupy” filled Twitter and slogans like “we are the 99%” were started on Tumblr’s blog page (Deluca et al., 2012). People who saw the movement on internet websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Internet Relay Chat, and Meetup were able to organize themselves without a group or an official leader. This meant movements could start anywhere since higher-up leadership and direction was not

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930 Words | 4 Pages

Some of the ways that the movement continues to have an effect today include raising awareness of income and wealth inequality. The movement drew attention to disparities between the wealthy elite and the rest of the population. Today, discussions of income and wealth inequality are more common and prominent in the media, political debates, and policy discussions. Next, this movement is shifting the political discourse. The Occupy Wall Street Movement challenged the dominant neoliberal economic ideology and shifted the political discourse towards a more progressive agenda that prioritizes social justice, economic equality, and environmental sustainability.

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1815 Words | 8 Pages

Introduction All over the world, there is an obvious contrast between the living standards and lifestyle of the rich and the poor. Moreover, there is a large gap between the populations of poor and wealthy. This is known as the Wealth Gap, and it is caused by Wealth Inequality. Wealth Income/Inequality is defined as “The unequal distribution of assets within a population.” Wealth is defined as more than just the amount of income a person has, but instead the value of a person’s assets.

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