It's not the 99% vs. the 1%. It's the 99% vs. the portion of the 1% that are shmucks.

[kpete]

I am the 1%. I'm with the 99%. If the boat sinks, we all drown.
byplf515Follow

....................

But there's a rhetoric out there, among some. There's a rhetoric saying that it's the rich versus the poor. Or the 1% vs. the 99%. It's not. Not everyone who is rich is a jerk; and some people who are poor are jerks. I'm guessing that the guy holding up the sign "keep government out of my medicare!" was not part of any elite.

But the 1%. Well, I'm not close to the top of that 1%. Alan Grayson is a lot closer. He's worth tens of millions, and he's a BIG OccupyWallStreet supporter.

Ever hear of Mohammed El-Erian? He's Wall Street if anyone is. He's CEO of an asset management company called PIMCO. He wrote an Op-Ed for Huffington post in support of OWS.

Because some of us 1% are smart enough to realize that if the boat sinks, we all drown.

...............................

It's not the 99% vs. the 1%. It's the 99% vs. the portion of the 1% that are shmucks.

......................

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/18/1027552/-I-am-the-1-Im-with-the-99-If-the-boat-sinks,-we-all-drown?via=siderec

[valerief]

1. It's Scrooge vs. Tiny Tim. nt

[Fumesucker]

2. OK, so it's the 99% versus the 0.99%..

:evilgrin:

[babylonsister]

3. if the boat sinks, we all drown.

Sorry I can't gather much sympathy, but he's right. The tiny fraction of knuckleheads are steering the rethug party over the cliff. So, Wall Street, if it's that critical, why aren't you doing anything about it?

:grr:

[TBF]

4. Missing the point - it is the system as opposed to individual actors. nt

[Demeter]

5. those individual actors were powerful enough to restructure the system

and they did, for decades. Since Jackson, actually, if not before.

[TBF]

6. When you're dealing with an inherently unequal system that rewards greed and corruption

I'm not sure they really needed to do much "restructuring". The hard part is reigning in that sort of system, which they managed for about 25 years with high taxation rates (1950s-70s) but that even fell apart after the threat of the USSR disappeared.

[Demeter]

7. Oh, believe me, they did

This Fed Reserve is the 3rd incarnation of a bankers' cartel, by my count. The bankers wanted in, badly, from the start. Their greed was one of the causes of the Revolution. The corporations worked to take down all the restrictions, starting about the time of the Civil War and the great railroad and oil "bidnesses" started. The revolution was fought not against just England, but against East India Company, the mother of all corporations.

There's a lot about our nation that we never heard of...the economic/political history. We learned about various wars and conquests, but not about the machinery that triggered them.

Someday someone with the resources (not I) will write a comprehensive history of the US from the unvarnished economic point of view. And then the fur will fly!

[TBF]

8. I have to admit I haven't read it yet -

but Zinn's history is supposed to be pretty good: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.html

I'd also agree that it's probably even worse behind the scenes than we can imagine.