Occupy Activists' New Fight for Regulation, Affordable Housing and Social Justice

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http://www.thenation.com/blog/176145/occupy-wall-streets-legacy-fight-regulation-affordable-housing-and-social-justice#axzz2egxkrV1m


Protesters march together in New York City as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 (PaulSteinJC/Flickr)

Next week marks the two-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, the protest movement that began in New York City’s Zuccotti Park in response to rampant Wall Street corruption and social and economic inequality.

And while most of the Occupy camps have been destroyed by police, many of the former occupiers still maintain the same spirit that birthed the movement, but now they’re channeling their energy elsewhere, often in more focused ways that, unfortunately, receive far less media attention.

All of the conditions that inspired the Occupy protests are still in place. For example, new analysis of IRS data finds that the income gap has actually widened to its highest levels in a century.

The top 1 percent of U.S. earners collected 19.3 percent of household income in 2012, their largest share in Internal Revenue Service figures going back a century.

U.S. income inequality has been growing for almost three decades. But until last year, the top 1 percent’s share of pre-tax income had not yet surpassed the 18.7 percent it reached in 1927, according to an analysis of IRS figures dating to 1913 by economists at the University of California, Berkeley, the Paris School of Economics and Oxford University.