Source Link: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

"This document focuses on the "Top 1%" as a whole because that's been the traditional cut-off point for "the top" in academic studies, and because it's easy for us to keep in mind that we are talking about one in a hundred. But it is also important to realize that the lower half of that top 1% has far less than those in the top half; in fact, both wealth and income are super-concentrated in the top 0.1%, which is just one in a thousand."

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Susan Herman, president of the ACLU, discusses the impact on the war on terror on average Americans. Post 9/11 programs such as the Patriot Act and other surveillance provisions have reversed the balance of power between the government and the people, allowing the government to abuse this power. The government now swims in a ocean of public data to which it has no desire to return back.

Workers with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America have occupied Serious Materials (formerly Republic Window & Door) in Chicago. The company had said it is closing operations at its Chicago plant due to "ongoing economic challenges in construction and building products, collapse in demand for window products, difficulty in obtaining favorable lease terms, high leasing and utility costs and taxes, and a range of other factors unrelated to labor costs[...]"

http://libcom.org/news/workers-occupy-factory-chicago-24022012

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Rep. Yasmin Neal of the George House of Representative Introduced a bill today that would bring a small degree of equality to the debate over reproductive rights.

A college student’s first protest takes him directly into the big leagues

By Connor Miller

The Occupy Wall Street movement and subsequent protests that are continuing across the United States have drawn world-wide attention. Our correspondent, a college freshman, participates in the first demonstration of his life. Here is his point-of-view of Occupy Wall Street.

Before I went to Occupy Wall Street, I did some research to see what I was protesting. I went to Occupywallst.org which told me the time and location of the occupation, but not much more. “The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%,” claimed the site. I felt like I could buy into this cause, so I got a couple of people from my college dorm just outside New York City come with me to Manhattan in the tradition of protesting college students.
. We were going to go down in history, just like the kids from the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the Paris spring of 1968, and Tiananmen Square. Hopefully not just like Tiananmen Square.

Go "here" to the Facebook group for the WNY bus.

All of us have a reason to go to New York City on September 17th: to occupy Wall Street. As of October 2008, over two million quality jobs were outsourced between 2004 and now; racial economic disparities mirrored policing disparities; as of 2001 we have a 700 plus strong (and expensive) network of military bases and a Global War on Terror; and pollution has firmly established itself as a cause of disease among poor communities. This one action will not resolve all of these problems at once yet, like Egypt it will be a political breakthrough moment, or like in Spain tens of thousands of citizens did begin a direct-democratic process to build a new movement for social justice. Where the earlier alter-globalization (a.k.a. anti-globalization) movement left off, we will pick up the slack with a flourishing new movement of movements.

The demands are numerous and over reddit, facebook, twitter, and via email, activists and disenfranchised people are having a virtual assembly 24 hours a day to cite each abuse of this economic system. In this conversation, every progressive measure that is neccesarry to fix our county- and our world is on the table: ending corporate personhood, community control of localized economies, collecting corporate back taxes, community banking, progressive taxation, and a new deal-style stimulus plan.

Disclaimer: In the following article, neither the hosts of the film screening, the attendees, or I are advocating terrorism, acts of economic sabotage, or violence of any kind. I, as a writer, am reporting on this event and discussing some of the themes in the film.

"We are the burning rage of a dying planet", is a fitting description for the Earth Liberation Front (ELF). Last night (Thursday, July 21), at 420 Connecticut (the future site for "Burning Books Bookstore" an independent, community based, progressive bookstore) the house was packed during the 7:00pm and 9:00pm screenings of "If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front". The 2011 documentary was created to examine the ELF away from the corporate media's branding of the group as terrorists/ eco-terrorists, but in their entirety through the eyes of a few of their members.