The Unofficial Pictorial Guide

Why Occupy:

Q: Why are all these jerks protesting? A: Because were in really big trouble.

Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head

The corporations are doing great...

... most of the so-called natural persons -- not so much

Instead of the famous trickle-down...

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Department of Labor

Its starting

e to look a little bit like som

hu ge, ro

aring

cone geyser shooting wealth

to

sk the

... so when pundits on TV talk about redistribution of wealth -maybe this is what they mean?

Too Small to Succeed

Meanwhile,

Source: Political Calculations

Also, the Job Creators are now more or less job exporters, if youre a stickler for details:

What Alan Greenspan once boasted about as greater worker insecurity has gone off the deep end.

I Hear a Train a Comin

We dont have the worlds highest violent crime rates...

... and violent crime has been on a steep decline ...

... so how, with less than 5% of the worlds population,

do we have almost a

quarter of the worlds prison population?

Today, about one out of every hundred American adults is incarcerated. Three are under correctional supervision-- and its climbing.

Many are imprisoned for non-violent offenses, like drug possession. Even if there isnt a moral issue, this is costing the taxpayer money, while politicians talk about cutting Social Security and Medicare -- not to mention jobs lost to a growing private, for-profit prison labor industry.

Hey, Speaking of Trains...

... our infrastructure is, ahem, a bit dusty. And yet, the factories capable making us lead the world in industry again are still disappearing one-by-one -- spirited away, somewhere far over the horizon. We have no modern rail system and, once the worlds bastion of unbelievable high-technology, courtesy of the American taxpayer, weve just settled into the worlds 28th in internet connect i o n sp e e d s . With so much to do, how is it that people are still out of work?

Source: CWA

Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream

Well, what do we still make? Good question! Dreams.
No, really. Very volatile, fickle dreams which, according to the Pew Economic Policy Group, recently cost the taxpayer at least $11,000 per household (with Federal Reserve lending to finance in excess of $1.2 trillion according to Bloomberg News) -- trailblazing the way for the worlds downward spiral into the whats now called the Global Financial Crisis.

Source: Economic Report of the President: 2007 Report Spreadsheet Tables, Tables B-1 and B-91.

Source: Table B-91. Corporate Profits by Industry, 19592007, Economic Report of the President, 2008.

The prelude to this meltdown was a fairly well-documented, marginally-legal scam where the most of our major financial institutions enjoyed a high-stakes game of hot-potato with toxic mortgages, sometimes even betting against their own clients. The Senates 635-page LevinCoburn Report on the matter made it clear this was all made possible by deregulation that removed the necessary checks and balances to ensure market responsibility. The regulation has not been restored and, in fact, some of those most gravely responsible immediately went to work for the new White House administration -- people who, as Bloomberg news columnist Jonathan Weil put it, should be getting subpoenas as material witnesses [...] not places in Obamas inner circle. Needless to say, these scammers make up very little of our surplus prison population.

Why Not Just Shut Up and Vote?

Corporate power is now locked firmly to state power in what some political scientists call the iron triangle. This undermines democracy. A lot of huge companies are parasitically dependent on the government which, in many ways, has become a puppet on a string.
Public polls over the last several decades reveal that the major policies of both political parties are frequently, if not usually, at odds with what the majority of Americans wants. Our electoral politics have devolved into reality television, if not the worlds scariest freak circus. The issues that concern people most are rarely even mentioned. Voting is great, but infinitely more productive when living in a relatively democratic society. The public interest, however, is treated like a fringe special interest. And the choices were given every year feel more and more like a twisted game of would you rather than a serious election.

Now Maybe the Voices in My Head Will Go Away

A handful of enormous conglomerates control virtually every mass medium in the United States, short of the internet. The courts have stated on several occasions, that these corporations have no responsibility to uphold a public trust, in exchange for the protected and exclusive privilege of broadcasting on public airwaves, and are entitled to political speech at their discretion. Commercial television was born out of public relations -- which is another name Edward Bernays, the fields founding father, in his own owns, made up for propaganda when World War II Germany somehow made that word unpopular. The content is the advertising, the filler is the stuff in between like news and entertainment, and were the product being sold. Newspapers are disappearing and the internet, which has been rumored to have a few minor credibility issues, is still a fledgling medium. Some of us think this tends to make it a bit challenging to have our voices heard, or even to figure out whats really going on behind the loud, traveling parade constantly screaming at us to buy more stuff.

Slide Down Your Shorts Please

Our healthcare system is very broken. Its the most expensive in the developed world with some of the worst outcomes. Its also the only private, for-profit system among OECD members. The few parts of our healthcare that are public, like Medicare, are far cheaper and more efficient. To quote a RWJF report:
While U.S. life expectancy is at or below the average in comparison with that of other developed countries, findings from research that has adjusted mortality to account for deaths not related to health care (so-called amenable mortality) show the United States to be among the worst performers

Sources: RWJF - http://www.rwjf.org/files/research/qualityquickstrikeaug2009.pdf WHO - http://www.who.int/whosis/whostat/2009/en/index.html

Comparing the most important factors in WHO data, like cancer mortality, cardiovascular mortality, number of doctors and nurses and available hospital beds, we only lead in obesity and private expenditure on health.

Our dysfunctional healthcare system, according to a comprehensive study by The American Journal of Medicine, accounts for over 60% of US bankruptcies. About 80% of the people filing for bankruptcy were insured.
Source: AMJMED http://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(09)00404-5/abstract

Little Wheel Spin and Spin

Whatever you may have heard, theres a global ecological disaster looming. 98% of climate scientists agree with the tenets of Anthropogenic (human-caused) Climate Change. Its no more a hoax than evolution. The only thing left uncertain is how bad it will be. MIT and Hadley Centre have predicted a 5.1C (9.1F) and 3-7C (5.4-12.6F) of warming by 2100 respectively, on our current emissions path. On November 9th, 2011 the International Energy Agency, the most trusted source for global energy projections and analysis, released its annual World Energy Outlook report. The report warned that on planned policies, rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change. We cannot afford to delay further action to tackle climate change if the long-term target of limiting the global average temperature increase to 2C, as analysed in the 450 Scenario, is to be achieved at reasonable cost. In the New Policies Scenario, the world is on a trajectory that results in a level of emissions consistent with a long-term average temperature increase of more than 3.5C. Without these new policies, we are on an even more dangerous track, for a temperature increase of 6C or more. These are conservative estimates, without accounting for positive feedbacks, which could accelerate this process. If that last scenario comes to pass, all mentioned here will cease to matter, because we wont have a country left to worry about. ... maybe not even a species.

The only remaining signatory country not to have ratified the Kyoto protocol is also the worlds richest and most powerful one -- our United States.

Q: What do we do about all this? A: (see next page)

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