Extreme wealth inequality in America illustrated. A must see.

(4 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

This video/infographic was published on YouTube last November. I hadn’t seen it before today. I think it’s incredibly well done and a must watch. I recommend maximizing the size (the bracket/square in the bottom right corner of the video) to get the full effect. At the end of the video, the creator, politizane, states that the work is being placed in the public domain.

Wealth Inequality in America

Published on Nov 20, 2012

Infographics on the distribution of wealth in America, highlighting both the inequality and the difference between our perception of inequality and the actual numbers. The reality is often not what we think it is.

If you were as impressed with this work as I was, please consider going to YouTube and giving it a thumbs up. Right now it has about 48,000 views. It needs to be seen by many more eyes.

There are many positive comments on YouTube, but there are a lot of negative ones too, and a good number have been removed, so presumably those were even worse. One person who seemed generally positive about it complained that there was no call for action. But the creator of the video did call for action. A simple action. Wake up!

And that is the real task here, to wake people up. It’s the first step. Even the people who had a instinctive negative reaction to this will not be able to forget it now that they have seen it. Seeds are planted by the facts depicted in those infographics. The extreme nature of our wealth inequality is really not known by most people in this country. That is a big part of the problem, and you don’t find things like this very often in the corporate media, dominated by the 1%, who really don’t want people to fully understand it.

This is why the Occupy movement was so successful. It planted seeds and woke people up, and changed the narrative and brought the issue of wealth inequality (a much better term than “income inequality”) to the forefront, along with other issues like money in campaigns, Citizens United and of course Wall Street. Never have these issues been more important than today, as major changes are being planned and executed in our country’s budgeting priorites — changes that can and will change the very fabric of our society. Never have these issues been more important, as Dodd-Frank regulations for the financial system are being implemented or undermined, as more and more people lose their homes in a fraudulent foreclosure process with a fake task force, and as statutes of limitation expire for holding people accountable for the fraud and crimes that caused the crash of 2008 that did such damage to our economy and our people.

As more and more people understand what’s going on, the Occupy movement will morph, reignite, and/or new movements will germinate. There are many valuable forms of activism. This video is an example of one of them — creating it, talking about it, writing about it, and spreading the information… and acting on it.

Below are some of my photos from Occupy Wall Street events in New York, Philadelphia and Wilmington, NC during the time period from September, 2011 to September, 2012 and some music to accompany them. There are also some photos from Occupy Congress in Washington, DC taken from a video.