"What we have is a war in our communities and that war is done by the global 1 percent".
(Photo: david_shankbone / Flickr)
Matt Renner: In your introduction to the book, you discuss New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's "cleanliness" excuse for clearing the original Occupy Wall Street encampment at Liberty Square. Why do you think so many public officials and right-wing pundits describe the occupiers as "unclean"?
Richard D. Wolff: Their problem has been, and continues to be, that they have no response to Occupy's basic attack on the inequity and antidemocratic social conditions summarized in the confrontation of, "1 percent against 99 percent." They know that the vast majority of Americans feel the truth of Occupy's social criticism, experience it in their lives, and sympathize with protest against and efforts to change a system with such unjust outcomes. So, they can refute little and need instead to distract public opinion from what Occupy focuses on.
The national movement looked local with an Earth Day action that took over a long-disputed tract of land in California's East Bay and turned it into a community farm with two acres of planted crops. Monday morning, activists were removed by force, but they vowed to return. Gopal Dayaneni climbed onto a truck, megaphone in hand, a straw hat shading his face as he spoke to the crowd gathered at the locked gates.
In May of 2011, the Air Force took the unusual and radical step of grounding their entire F-22 Raptor fighter aircraft fleet because it appeared that something was wrong with the pilot's oxygen system. One crash that killed a pilot looked like the oxygen system might have been a factor in the crash. An usually high percentage of pilots, 14 incidents in three years, were getting confused while flying and even on the ground days after they landed. But the grounding of this controversial planewas an embarrassment to the Air Force and the company that built the plane, Lockheed Martin.
