The One Percent

This 80-minute documentary focuses on the growing "wealth gap" in America, as seen through the eyes of filmmaker Jamie Johnson, a 27-year-old heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune. 

Johnson, who cut his film teeth at NYU and made the Emmy®-nominated 2003 HBO documentary Born Rich, here sets his sights on exploring the political, moral and emotional rationale that enables a tiny percentage of Americans - the one percent - to control nearly half the wealth of the entire United States. 

The film Includes interviews with Nicole Buffett, Bill Gates Sr., Adnan Khashoggi, Milton Friedman, Robert Reich, Ralph Nader and other luminaries.

http://www.theonepercentdocumentary.com/

The Plutocracy Will Go To Extremes To Keep The 1% In Control

The One Percent is not only increasing their share of wealth — they’re using it to spread millions among political candidates who serve their interests. Example: Goldman Sachs, which gave more money than any other major American corporation to Barack Obama in 2008, is switching alliances this year; their employees have given $900,000 both to Mitt Romney’s campaign and to the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future. Why?

Because, says the Wall Street Journal, the Goldman Sachs gang felt betrayed by President Obama’s modest attempts at financial reform. To discuss how the super-rich have willfully confused their self-interest with America’s interest, Bill is joined by Rolling Stone magazine’s Matt Taibbi, who regularly shines his spotlight on scandals involving big business and government, and journalist Chrystia Freeland, author of the new book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.

BILL MOYERS: The new Gilded Age is roaring down on us, an uncaged tiger on a rampage. Walk out to the street in front of our office and turn right and you can see the symbol of it: a fancy new skyscraper going up two blocks away. When finished, this high rise among high rises will tower a thousand feet, the tallest residential building in the city.

The New York Times has dubbed it "the global billionaires club," and for good reason. At least of two of the apartments are under contract for more than $90 million each. Others, more modest, range in price from $45 million to more than 50 million.

Simultaneously, the powers-that-be have just awarded Donald Trump -- yes, that Donald Trump -- the right to run a golf course in the Bronx which taxpayers are spending at least $97 million to build. What “amounts to a public subsidy,” says the indignant city comptroller, "for a luxury golf course." Good grief. A handout to the plutocrat's plutocrat.

This, in a city where economic inequality rivals that of a third-world country. Of America's 25 largest cities, New York is now the most unequal. The median income for the bottom 20% last year was less than $9,000, while the top one percent of New Yorkers has an average annual income of $2.2 million.

Across America, this divide between the superrich and everyone else has become a yawning chasm and studies indicate it may stifle jobs and growth for years to come. At no time in modern history has the top one hundredth of one percent owned more of our wealth or paid so low a tax rate. But in neither of the two presidential debates so far has the vastness of this astounding inequality gap been discussed. Not by Mitt Romney, who is the embodiment of the predatory world of financial capitalism. And not even by Barack Obama, whose party once fought for working men and women against the economic royalists.

Via: "Alter-Net"

Governments Exist To Further The Interests of "Favored Groups"

"We The People" Are Never The Favored Group

"Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmer, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system."—Herbert Hoover’s treasury secretary Andrew Mellon

By Prof. John Kozy
July 14, 2012
Courtesy Of "Information Clearing House"

Paul Krugman recently wrote that

the fact is that the Fed, like the European Central Bank, like the U.S. Congress, like the government of Germany, has decided that avoiding economic disaster is somebody else’s responsibility.

None of this should be happening. As in 1931, Western nations have the resources they need to avoid catastrophe, and indeed to restore prosperity — and we have the added advantage of knowing much more than our great-grandparents did about how depressions happen and how to end them. But knowledge and resources do no good if those who possess them refuse to use them.

And that’s what seems to be happening. The fundamentals of the world economy aren’t, in themselves, all that scary; it’s the almost universal abdication of responsibility that fills me, and many other economists, with a growing sense of dread.

Krugman and most other Americans are fond of blaming social problems on the personal failings of individuals rather than on the systemic failings of institutions. It is people borrowing more than they can afford rather than banks lending too loosely or consumers saving too little rather than businesses paying too little to enable consumers to save that causes all of the problems. But borrowing and lending and saving and income are not independent variables. People are persons with personal failures but banks are institutions with systemic failures, and the systemic failures can entice people to engage in activities that may look like personal failures but are not. Krugman and many others assume that governments and their institutions exist to solve the problems peoples face. When the problems persist, these people again assume that it is because those in government just aren't doing their jobs. But there is very little historical evidence to support this view.

The government of Louis XVI made scanty attempts to solve the problems of the French people which ultimately led to the French Revolution. The various governments in the United States in the early 1800 made few attempts to resolve the problems raised by slavery in American society and the Supreme Court made any resolution of them impossible which led to the Civil War. Emperor Franz Joseph of Austro-Hungary made no effort to resolve the ethnic problems his empire faced in the Balkans which ultimately led to the First World War. Great Britain and France made no attempts to ameliorate the problems Germany faced as a result of the conditions imposed on it by the Treaty of Versailles which then resulted in the Second World War. No government has made much of an attempt to resolve the problems created in the Levant by the creation of Israel, and instability, slaughter, and war have prevailed ever since. Now a third world war, an atomic conflagration, may be in the offing.

Domestic and international conflicts are being exacerbated world-wide by similar failures at problem resolution. The Western nations and Israel are not making any serious attempts to resolve their problems with Iran. The only possibility of resolving the problems in Western minds is for Iran to merely conform to what the Western world wants. Western European nations are treating the debt crisis similarly. There is only one resolution: the Southern European states must merely do what the Northern ones say regardless of how it affects the peoples of Southern Europe. And the American Congress is paralyzed by each party's insistence that its way is the only way.

So what is really going on? What are Krugman and others missing? The answer is as plain as sunlight on a cloudless day.

Governments have never existed to solve problems domestic or international. Governments and their institutions exist merely to further and secure the interests of favored groups. For instance, each nation's foreign policy always consists of "protecting our interests" somewhere or other. Whose interests are "our interests"? Why the favored group's, of course. And who are the favored groups? Well, it all depends.

The favored group of European governments is international investors, not the common people of a single European nation. The Greeks can be damned so long as the investors get repaid even though the common people of Greece did not borrow one euro from international investors, the Greek government, which has no income it doesn't take from ordinary Greeks, did, and the investors were not only willing but anxious to lend. The favored group of the Mubarak government in Egypt was the Egyptian military that even after the overthrow of Mubarak is still trying to secure its interests. The favored group in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen is a royal family. In Iraq and Iran, a religious sect is favored. Every one of these governments except, perhaps, Iceland has shown a willingness to kill those common people who are never the favored group.

The United States of America is an extreme case. The Democrats in Congress have their favored groups; so do the Republicans. But the common people is not the favored group of either party, although the politicians pay homage to it. America is comprised of a mass of groups, some favored, some not. Even though the nation's founders warned the Colonists about the danger of factions, every issue in America attracts a faction, and sometime or other, government favors one or more of them. Americans have pro and an anti-immigration factions. Within these, there are pro and anti-Asian factions, pro and anti-Latino factions and within these, Central and South American and Cuban factions. There are pro and anti-gun control factions, abortion factions, contraception factions, labor factions, business factions, healthcare factions, free and regulated market factions, free trade and protectionist factions, global warming and anti-global warming factions, more and less taxation factions, big and small government factions, federal and states' rights factions, imperialist and anti-imperialist factions, religious and anti-religious factions. Factions here; factions there; disagreement everywhere! Where Americans once believed united we stand, divided we fall, today they believe division secures our group's special interests. And the moneyed groups have made this work by using raw power and bribery.

But the nation? Oh, well, its seams are all coming apart. The nation doesn't matter to factions; only the interests of the favored group does. And that is why American society does not work. It is a nation whose people do not live together; they merely live side by side, where neighbors who have lived side by side for years break into violent conflict over the most trivial of things: a barking dog, a crowing rooster, a loud party, a minor inconvenience as, for instance, a parked car, children playing in someone's yard, a tree-limb extending over a property line, a sign or even an American flag on a pole, the color of a house, the height of a lawn and the kind of plants in it—just some of the recent neighborly conflicts I have observed.

America is a nation comprised of people who revel in conflict. Even the legal system is adversarial. Our cities, or at least parts of them, are war zones. More people are killed daily in America than in Afghanistan. Since Americans can't get along with each other why would anyone expect them to get along with the rest of the world? What makes anyone believe Americans care if Sunni and Shi'as get along?

The human condition will never improve until governments everywhere begin governing for the people, all the people, and none but all the people. So long as governments govern for the benefit of special groups, antagonisms, dislikes, and hatred will prevail; the Earth will seethe with conflict.

Some will say it's just human nature, that human beings have a dark side rooted in greed that cannot be extirpated. If so, we are just like ants where workers and soldiers live merely to provide for queens and their entourages of drones who exist merely to produce more ants, where common people are but beasts of burden that exist for the sake of the greedy. Perhaps this view is accurate, but the best of humanity has never thought so. Only Machiavelli's The Prince among thousands of works is renowned for this view (although Ayn Rand may be catching up). Religious and humanitarian works that contest it abound.

The trouble is we have too many people like Paul Krugman. Generally his heart seems to be in the right place; he seems to genuinely care about what happens to people, but he never goes far enough. He and those like him seem never to be able to mine an argument deep enough to find the source of its lode. They stop digging when they get to something that fits their preconceptions, as, for instance, personal human failures.

During an interview on Internet radio, I was once asked, being a veteran, why soldiers fight. The host, I am certain, expected some profound response such as for God and country, for human dignity, for the rights and freedoms our people enjoy. But I merely answered, because they're there!

When we take perfectly normal young Americans off the street and send them into battle, we do not presume that they are inherently killers. After all, killers are bad people. Yet we send these good young men and women off to kill and they do. When they return, we again do not assume they are killers. We expect them to return to being perfectly normal young men and women. So do bankers do what they do because they're bad people or because they're bankers and banking requires it? Are politicians corrupt because they are bad people or are they corrupt because politics requires it?

People, ask yourselves this question. Do our institutions make us what we are? If our institutions promote greed, will we be greedy, if our institutions promote killing will we be killers, if our institutions promote bribery, will we be bribed, if our institutions promote corruption, will we be corrupt? What will we be when our institutions promote goodness and how can we build such institutions?

The Romans had an expression—cui prodest?—meaning “who stands to gain?" Who advocates a specific view isn't important; what is important is who stands to gain from it. Only then can who the view favors be known. But in today's world, cui prodest? is too general a question. It is too easy to conjure up arguments that purport to show that many or even all gain. That everyone gains from tax cuts for the rich can be argued ad infinitum.

But who stands to gain the most financially can't. It always has a specific answer, and if you want to know who the government's favored group is at any time, that is the question that must be answered. When the answer is some group other than the common people, the view must be rejected; otherwise, the human condition is mired in the mud of hate and will never improve, conflict will persist, and the human race will very likely exterminate itself and perhaps life itself.

Jefferson knew that merchants had no country. And that the business of America is business has often been voiced by the established elite and endorsed by the Republican party. The Congress is in gridlock because the Republicans do not care what happens to America or the American people, just so long as their favored constituents' interests are preserved. That is what Paul Krugman and others like him fail to understand. That is why the models of economists, even if any turn out to work, are of no consequence. The only models that matter are those that advance and secure the interests of the favored group. Can the problem of unemployment be solved? Nobody in power really cares! Can the problem of world-wide poverty be solved? Nobody in power really cares! Can peace ever prevail between human beings? Nobody in power really cares! The dead require no benefits, and a very small government will suffice.

Postscript.

Since drafting this piece, I have discovered that three political scientists, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, have provided empirical evidence for my thesis in Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches. Their views are summarized in a piece by Daniel Little:

"What is really interesting about this analysis is that it implies that the sizzling rhetoric coming from the right -- personal attacks on the President, anti-gay rants, renewed heat around abortion and contraception -- is just window dressing. By the evidence of voting records, what the right really cares about is economic issues favoring the affluent -- tax cuts, reduced social spending, reduced regulation of business activity, and estate taxes. This isn't to say that the enraged cultural commentators aren't sincere about their personal belief -- who knows? But the policies of their party are very consistent, in the analysis offered here. Maybe the best way of understanding the extremist pundits is as a class of well-paid entertainers, riffing on themes of hatred and cultural fundamentalism that have nothing to do with the real goals of their party."

There you have it. The people are viewed by the establishment as chickens to be broiled for lunch.

John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who writes on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university professor and another 20 years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site's homepage.

Copyright © John Kozy

CONSUMERS Are The Real‘Job Creators’

Here is the much-talked-about TED talk on inequality given by Nick Hanauer. We (TED) are posting it here to promote public discussion on an important issue. For more background on this, see this blog post from TED Curator Chris Anderson: http://tedchris.posterous.com


Who is Nick Hanauer? Nick Hanauer is a venture capitalist from Seattle, whose speech at the TED University conference was deemed "too politically controversial to post on their web site." 

Security For The One-Percent

Police As Commodity 

By WILLEM de LINT 
MARCH 28, 2012 
Courtesy Of "CounterPunch"

Over the past several years, but now with more intensity, domestic security measures are being mooted, planned, and carried out with a purposefulness that appears to take as a given that what is good for the 1% is good for the rest of us. Moreover, they appear to be developed with the eager cooperation of domestic policing and security actors and agents. What of this presumption? Do the mandates and interests of policing and security actors and agencies match up with those of a minute proportion (1%) of the polity?

In 1829 a new model of policing arose after industrialisation, urbanisation and when the arrival of a new merchant class required a recalibration from feudal to capital class relations. People were forced into close and sometimes unsanitary and “uncivil” contact. Tumult had been in the air. There were revolutionary class fractures. There were spectacular public order affrays. There were riots about food, taxes, sectarian discrimination.

Still, the view that it was desirable or possible to put things in order with raw military power or surveillance and disruption (following the French model) was untenable in a country that had come to value the rule of law. In ushering the new police through parliament, Sir Robert Peel said famously of the New Metropolitan London Police that “the police are the public and the public are the police.”

Is revolution is in the air again? The rumblings of revolt networked to the OWS are not connected directly to war, food shortages or taxes. They are tied to matters of distributive justice and the question of who may speak and whose voice may be heard in the halls of the major institutions of liberal democracy.

Judging by the anticipatory response, it would seem that steps are being taken in anticipation of a major conflagration in the homeland.

Which brings us back to the question of how policing and domestic security has been – and ought to be – understood as an institution of liberal governance. The Department of Homeland Security is both instance and measure of the feared eventuality of domestic insecurity. Relaxation on domestic spying by the NSA and CIA, and on COINTELPRO-like activities by the NYPD (in its extra-territorial spying activities, “mosque crawls”), and in the fusion site popping up throughout the country, suggest surveillance or national security state configurations eerily consistent with the French gendarmes so adamantly refused as a model for the modern police.

The grounding of these fusions in post-911 homegrown terrorism is also a basis that has allowed the deliberate erosion of rights and freedoms one target at a time. But doesn’t the argument that existential security and quotidian safety give the state and the individual inseparable interests require a referendum (of the 99%)?

What is on offer looks like a false flag behind which the true object is almost invisible. That object is the very possibility that the 99% will indeed perceive their interests in stark contradistinction to those of the 1%; that they will demand not only redistribution, but a new distributive measure or paradigm. It is this eventuality of a unified revolt of the masses that is being planned against. Its leaders or spokespersons listed. Its means of association countered.

And it is in this effort that we also return to the role of domestic policing and security. It has been the fatuous presumption of the 1% that police and security actors and agencies are in their pocket, paid for and paid off. Mayor Bloomberg is rightly portrayed as believing that the NYPD is a private army of himself and Wall Street. The presumption of those currently broker power in America (and the world) is “l’etat c’est moi”, that whatever the need, there can be no doubt as to the loyalties of men and women in blue – that is to say, black.

Is this how it will go? In all revolutionary moments – including the one the 1% appears to be planning on – there is a question as to where military, policing and security forces will place their bets. Most recently in the Arab Spring we saw this in the shifting allegiances of the Egyptian military. So what of policing and security actors who work for the people? Do they not, after all, subscribe to the belief that the distinction between the 99% and 1% is real and meaningful?

More fundamentally, will public police allow themselves to continue to be “played” by the military-finance-security complex of the 1%, despite how grossly such a fealty separates them from their true craft and those whose hard work in fact pays their salaries and provides them with a remnant of legitimacy. Is there discussion around the boardroom table of the largest public policing and security providers regarding the interests of those constituents that are in fact paying the piper? If not, it had better get up.

It might not be too bold to assert that another paradigm shift in social and economic relations is unfolding. As before, this will push status quo assumptions to the brink. No, I do not refer to the convenient distraction of a “terrorist threat.” On the contrary, the proper object concerns the assumptions upon which a trajectory of a future may still be possible. The economic ideology that has pushed us to the brink is the true threat to our security. A paradigm which depends both upon gross inequality and diminishing renewable resources is untenable. And we depend uponour police and security services to be of service as we cross a great chasm of unrest and seek a different grounding for a collective future.

True, the OWS movement has not stipulated those new grounds. A new bull awaits. The bell has not rung out. In the meantime, we know thatmovement, widespread and revolutionary social movement, is necessary and practical; this for a chance of a more firm security.

Willem de Lint is a Professor in Criminal Justice at Flinders Law School, Flinders University of South Australia.

The 99% Declaration

Posted by guest blogger "Sayf Maslul"

The 99% Declaration

The American Dream Is Dying, But THERE IS A SOLUTION!

WHEREAS THE FIRST AMENDMENT TO THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION PROVIDES THAT:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

BE IT RESOLVED THAT WE, THE NINETY-NINE PERCENT OF THE PEOPLE of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in order to form a more perfect Union, by, for and of the People, shall elect 878 Delegates the weekend of June 1st, 2012, and convene a NATIONAL GENERAL ASSEMBLY the week of July 4, 2012 in the City Of Philadelphia to prepare and ratify a PETITION FOR A REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES on behalf of the Ninety-Nine Percent of the People of the United States to be served upon the United States Congress, United States Supreme Court and President of the United States prior to November 6, 2012. HELP DRAFT THIS HISTORIC DOCUMENT!

The final version of the PETITION FOR A REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES, is to be written and ratified solely by the elected Delegates, and may or may not include the following grievances and solutions currently suggested by the 99% Declaration Working Group.

1. Elimination of the Corporate State.
2. Overturning the “Citizens United” Case.
3. Elimination of All Private Benefits to Public Servants.
4. Term Limits.
5. A Fair Tax Code.
6. Health Care for All.
7. Protection of the Planet.
8. Debt Reduction.
9. Jobs for All Americans.
10. Student Loan Debt Refinancing.
11. Ending Perpetual War for Profit.
12. Emergency Reform of Public Education. 13 End Outsourcing and Currency Manipulation.
13. Banking and Securities Reform.
14. Foreclosure Moratorium, Mortgage Refinancing and Principal Write Downs.
15. Review and Reform of the Federal Reserve Banking System.
16. Ending the Electoral College and Enactment of Uniform Federal Election Rules.
17. Ending the War in Afghanistan and Take Care of Veterans.
18. No Censorship of the Internet.
19. Reinstitution of Civil Rights Including the Repeal of the NDAA.
20. Curtailing the Private Prison Industrial Complex.

Details here

Fighting One Per Cent Wars

An American Fact Is The 99 Per Cent Are Far Too Remote From The Wars Of Choice and Those Who Fight Them. 

By William J. Astore, 
Retired Lieutenant Colonel (USAF). 
Last Modified: 22 Dec 2011 07:25 
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

Williamsport, Pennsylvania - America's wars are remote. They're remote from us geographically, remote from us emotionally (unless you're serving in the military or have a close relative or friend who serves), and remote from our major media outlets, which have given us no compelling narrative about them, except that they're being fought by"America's heroes" against foreign terrorists and evil-doers. They're even being fought, in significant part, by remote control - by robotic drones "piloted" by ground-based operators from a secret network of bases located hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from the danger of the battlefield.

Their remoteness, which breeds detachment if not complacency at home, is no accident. Indeed, it's a product of the fact that Afghanistan and Iraq were wars of choice, not wars of necessity. It's a product of the fact that we've chosen to create a "warrior" or "war fighter" caste in this country, which we send with few concerns and fewer qualms toprosecute Washington's foreign wars of choice.

The results have been predictable, as in predictably bad. The troops suffer. Iraqi and Afghan innocents suffer even more. And yet we don't suffer, at least not in ways that are easily noticeable, because of that very remoteness. We've chosen - or let others do the choosing - to remove ourselves from all the pain and horror of the wars being waged in our name. And that's a choice we've made at our peril, since a state of permanent remote war has weakened our military, drained our treasury, and eroded our rights and freedoms.

Wars Of Necessity vs Wars Of Choice

World War II was a war of necessity. In such a war, all Americans had a stake. Adolf Hitler and Nazism had to be defeated; so too did Japanese militarism. Indeed, war goals were that clear, that simple, to state. For that war, we relied without controversy on an equitable draft of citizen-soldiers to share the burdens of defence.

Contrast this with our current 1 per cent wars. In them, 99 per cent of Americans have no stake. The 1 per cent who does are largely ID-card-carrying members of what President Dwight D Eisenhower so memorably called the "military-industrial complex" in 1961.

In the half-century since, that web of crony corporations, lobbyists, politicians and retired military types who have passed through Washington's revolving door has grown ever more gargantuan and tangled, engorged by untold trillions devoted to a national security and intelligence complex that seemingly dominates Washington. They are the ones who, in turn, have dispatched another 1 per cent - the lone per cent of Americans in our All-Volunteer Military - to repetitive tours of duty fighting endless wars abroad.

Unlike previous wars of necessity, the mission behind our wars of choice is nebulous, confusing, and seems in constant flux. Is it a fight against terror (which, as so many have pointed out, is in any case a method, not an enemy)? A fight for oil and other strategic resources? A fight to spread freedom and democracy? A fight to build nations? A fight to show American resolve or make the world safe from al-Qaeda? 

Who really knows anymore, now that Washington seldom bothers to bring up the "why" question at all, preferring simply to fight on without surcease?

In wars of choice, of course, the mission is whatever our leaders choose it to be, which gives the citizenry (assuming we're watching closely, which we're not) no criteria with which to measure success, let alone determine an endpoint.

"Our distant permanent wars, our 1 per cent wars of choice, will remain remote from our emotions and our thinking, requiring few sacrifices except from our troops, who grow ever more remote from our polity."

How do we know these are wars of choice? It's simple: because we could elect to leave whenever we wanted or whenever the heat got too high, as is currently the case in Iraq (even if we are leaving behind a fortress embassy the size of the Vatican with a private army of 5,000 rent-a-guns to defend it), and as we are likely to do in Afghanistan sometime in the years after the 2012 presidential election. The choice is ours. The people without a choice are of course the Iraqis and Afghans whom we'll leave to pick up the pieces.

Even our vaunted Global War on Terror is a war of choice. Think about it: Who has control over our own terror - us or our enemies? We can only be terrorised in the first place if we choose to give in to fear.

Think here of the "shoe bomber" in 2001 and the "underwear bomber" in 2009. Why did the criminally inept actions of these two losers garner so much attention (and fear-mongering) in the American media? As the self-confessed greatest and most powerful nation on Earth, shouldn't we have shared a collective belly laugh at the absurdity and incompetence of those "attacks" and gone about our business?

Instead of laughing, of course, we allowed yet more American treasure to be poured into technology and screening systems that may never even have caught a terrorist. We consented to be watched ever more and consulted ever less. We chose to reaffirm our terrors every time we doffed our shoes or submitted supinely to being scoped or groped at our nation's airports.

Our distant permanent wars, our 1 per cent wars of choice, will remain remote from our emotions and our thinking, requiring few sacrifices except from our troops, who grow ever more remote from our polity. This is especially true of the US' young adults, between 18 and 29 years of age, who are the least likely to have family members in the military, according to a recent Pew Research Centre study.

The result? An already emergent warrior-caste might grow ever more estranged from the 99 per cent, creating tensions and encouraging grievances that quite possibly could be manipulated by that other 1 per cent: the powerbrokers, money-makers and string-pullers, already so eager to call out the police to bully and arrest occupy movements in numerous cities across this once-great land.

Our Military Or Their Military?

As we fight wars of choice in distant lands for ever-shifting goals, what if "our troops" simply continue to grow ever more remote from us? What if they become "their" troops? Is this not the true terror we should be mobilising as a nation to prevent: The terror of separating our military almost totally from our nation - and ourselves?

As Admiral Mike Mullen, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put it recently to Time: "Long term, if the military drifts away from its people in this country, that is a catastrophic outcome we as a country can't tolerate".

Behold a horrifying fate: people that allow their wars of choice to compromise the very core of their self-image as a freedom-loving society, while letting itself be estranged from the young men and women who served in the frontlines of these wars.

Here's an American fact: the 99 per cent are far too remote from our wars of choice and those who fight them. To reclaim the latter, we must end the former. And that's a war of necessity that has to be fought - and won.

William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School, and now teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology.

A version of this article was first published on Tom Dispatch.

Fallujah Veteran: 'I Served The 1%'

Wall Street's Wars 

Thoughts On The Role Of veterans In The Occupy Movement 

By Ross Caputi 
November 08, 2011 
Courtesy Of "Answer Coalition"

I did not serve my country in Iraq; I served the 1%. It was on their behalf that I helped lay siege to Fallujah, helped kill thousands of civilians, helped displace hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and helped destroy an entire city. My "service" served Exxon-Mobil, Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater, and other multinational corporations in Iraq.

My family in Massachusetts is not safer because of my service, and Iraqis are not freer. I helped oppress Iraqis in a manner far more brutal than what has been experienced by the Occupy movement at the hands of the New York and Oakland police departments.

I was an occupier and am now an #occupier. I once served the 1%, but now try to serve the 99%. That is why I must speak up when I see the Occupy movement being led astray by the same nationalism and “Ameri-centrism,” the same thoughtless praises for U.S. troops and veterans, and the same hypocrisy that led us into the so-called “War On Terror” and the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Many of us have joined the Occupy movement, because we identify as members of the 99%, but the media only began to highlight our participation after Cpl. Scott Olsen was shot in the head by the Oakland police with a projectile on Oct. 25. Olsen was immediately rushed to the emergency room, and his name soon became a rallying cry. A nationwide call was put out for vigils in solidarity with Olsen.

Going To War Is Not "Serving Our Country" 

The Occupy movement was quick to highlight Olsen's "service" and his two deployments to Iraq. The New York Times noted that "his injury—and the oddity of a Marine who faced enemy fire only to be attacked at home—has prompted an outpouring of sympathy, as well as calls for solidarity."

Although Olsen appears to oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—he is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans For Peace,—the Occupy movement's response to his attack has revealed ambivalence on these issues.

The Occupy movement has glossed over the irony that Olsen was put in the hospital by some of the same tactics that his Marine Corps has used against Iraqis. It has not drawn a connection between what happened to Olsen and what happened to Iraqis who peacefully protested against the U.S. occupation of their country—like in Fallujah on April 28, 2003, when the U.S. fired into a crowd of protesters and killed 13 civilians. Countless other identical incidents have taken place, even today as Iraqis also protest unemployment, corruption and lack of services.

When the Occupy movement mentions Olsen's "service" without clarifying who he served, they hide the lies of the 1% and ignore the more than 1 million dead Iraqis, the millions of refugees and orphans, and the dramatic rise in cancers and birth defects in Iraq.

We Must Stand For The Most Affected Victims Of Wall Street

I watched a Youtube video the other day of U.S. Marine Corps Sgt. Shamar Thomas shouting at the NYPD: "If you want to go kill or hurt people, go to Iraq. Why are you hurting U.S. citizens?" as a crowd of Occupy Wall Street protesters cheered him on.

Over 2.5 million people have watched this video, and Thomas appeared on Rosie O'Donnell's television show and made several appearances on Keith Olbermann. Everyone championed his "service" and decried police brutality against U.S. citizens. Nobody questioned the dismissal of the value of Iraqi lives.

We should all decry police brutality wherever it rears its ugly head. Yet police brutality and the murder of innocent civilians in foreign countries in service of the 1% are both moral issues, and to decry one without decrying the other suggests a serious disconnect.

These attitudes in our movement are deeply troubling to me. We decry economic injustice at home, but stay silent about the unjust occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. We decry police brutality at home, while the U.S. war machine brutalizes innocent people abroad. We need to understand that Iraqis, Afghans, Palestinians, Libyans and everyone else who has fallen victim to the 1% and its war machine are part of the 99%, too.

We can love our country, but we should not value American lives more than any other. We can set up a Scott Olsen Support Fund, but we should not ignore the rise in cancers and birth defects that U.S. weapons have caused in Iraq.

Veterans have an important role to play in this movement, but we are not heroes because of our participation in the wars, and it is shameful for anyone to use us to appeal to patriotism; that only serves the 1%. What we have to offer this movement is a first-hand account of what the 1%  has done all over the world at the expense of the 99%. We as veterans are in a better position than anyone else to fight against the dangerous beliefs that put veterans on a pedestal. It is our responsibility to speak out against injustice, no matter where it occurs in this world.

The author is a Marine Corps veteran of the second siege of Fallujah and a member of March Forward!. He is the founder of the 'Justice for Fallujah Project' which will host various events during the second annual 'Remember Fallujah Week,' Nov. 16-19. Click here for more information.