Occupy Movement Has Declared War on the Great Recession

Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933 inaugural address,
declaring "War" on the Great Depression

The corporate media may obsess about what Occupy Wall Street is all about, but the images linked to below should make it clear to the most obtuse talking heads the growing public awareness that American society has become a plutocracy—a corruption of the democratic promise that the people of a country ought to be the decision makers in major institutions and social arrangements.

By Les Leopold

What are the Occupy Wall Street protesters angry about? The same things we’re all angry about. The only difference is the protestors turned their anger into public action. Occupy Wall Street lit the embers and the sparks are flying. Whether it turns into a genuine populist prairie fire depends on all of us.

Now is not the time for wonky policy solutions, as the media meatheads are calling for. Rather, it’s time to air our grievances as loudly as possible, which is precisely what Wall Street and its minions fear the most. Here’s a brief list of why we should be angry and the charts to back it up.

The American Dream is imploding.
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For the graphical data on American society see What Motivates the Occupy Movement, though this will come as no surprise to Americans whose jobs were shipped overseas, whose homes were foreclosed or the betrayed veterans' families who took their own lives.

Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be values only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit, and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing.
- President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933 inaugural address declaring "War" on the Great Depression