How The Top 1% Are Reshaping America

By on November 8, 2011 in News 8

Completed a few weeks before the Occupy Wall Street protests began, the latest episode of Al Jazeera’s fantastic Fault Lines program takes a hard look at the wealthiest 1% in the United States, including talking to those in the 1% about what their wealth means:

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  • laughing stock

    money hoarding, Its a disease that makes everyone around you sick. I would love to beat that business major from Harvard in chess. To be truly rich is to make everything around you function perfectly. Trying to be a giant in a land of little people is futile. 

  • laughing stock

    money hoarding, Its a disease that makes everyone around you sick. I would love to beat that business major from Harvard in chess. To be truly rich is to make everything around you function perfectly. Trying to be a giant in a land of little people is futile. 

  • Anti_secret_squirrel

    I really like this video.  I like how she tries to get the unbiased opinion of all sides and angles out there but for the most part the “tea party” conservative side really just makes an ass out of themselves as usual.  I am the 99% and without “entitlement” programs like food stamps I would be like back when there was a USSR standing in a bread line waiting for food or starving for that matter.  I guess being on food stamps is more of a humane way of getting food than in a bread line starving but either way I say “flat tax” on everyone if you make over $30k a year.  Most of the people that make under that are supporting 2+ people and they need a tax break or no tax for that matter.  Then the rich can’t say, “Oh, its not fair that I am paying so much taxes.” Then I say, “Well you are paying 12% like everyone else.”

  • http://buzzcoastin.posterous.com BuzzCoastin

    There have been several studies done
    about the effects of money on monkey societies.
    (search: money capuchin monkeys)

    In all cases
    the effects of the money on the monkeys
    are the same effects it has on humans;
    greed, theft, hording, prostitution
    all come about as effects of money.

    If you statistically compare
    the financial transactions of humans and monkeys
    you can’t tell the difference for the statistics.

    The Military-Industrial-Bankster Complex
    is a group of alpha chimps
    and we are their bitches
    as long as the effects of money are ignored.

  • Knight

     Why aren’t the OWS people marching on Obama’s Whitehouse where the “Change” was promised and the power to change things resides? This is about Wall Street corruption but these occupiers don’t seem to have any focus aside from personal demands and generalized gripes. The Whitehouse has the power to subpoena and investigate corporate corruption. Unfortunately for the OWS crowd they overwhelmingly voted for the man in the Whitehouse and he in turn campaigned on Wall Street money.
     
     The founders of 1776 America were poor by today’s standards, as were 99% of the immigrants that came to America afterwards and then prospered. There was no Liberal welfare, preferential entitlements or a large populous interested in drugs & alcohol. People educated themselves with marketable skills for the sake of real advancement in society, without the degrees in uselessness or the lowered educational standards to include all demographics regardless of skill.
     
     It’s going to be mighty hard for the US to shake these new cultural predispositions. How will America now “go back to work” to raise the standards of living? The manufacturing and much of the technologies sectors have been outsourced via globalization. The bulk of US employment is now based on a service economy, including unproductive public service government jobs. The US continues to flood its remaining labour employment markets with cheap Third World labour via open borders while the existing welfare recipients climbs over 46 million people.
     
     People can bemoan “the rich” all they wish, the rich will do just fine. If and when this “system” falls apart, the rich will jump on boats and planes and head to sunnier, safer locations, where their money already resides. In the interim, people need to understand that without the rich, there is no wealth. The government cannot print money and simply say it has value without some productive source behind it. Without the rich, there will be millions of welfare recipients without a monthly check, and allot more people living in tent cities than do today. You cannot take their wealth away, they won’t let you, and even then what would you do with it, build a company, or build a fabulous crib, snort lots of cocaine, and play PS3 all day long?
     
     
     
     
     
     

  • Anonymous

    typical neo-con job, mix truth and lies and end your comment with  bullsh_t ayn rand sociopathy.

  • Todd134

     Running away from the masses worked real well with the rich in the case of Mussolini, Gaddafi,
    Louis XVI, Czar Nicholas II, and Czar Alexander II, now didn’t it? Those leaders had whole armies behind them and even they couldn’t protect themselves from the inevitable.

  • http://www.displaysandholders.com/displays-and-holders sign holders

    its the good try and we can reshaping great……