Joel D. Skene

As the Occupy Wallstreet movement continues to grow around the country and with the majority of americans agreeing with the protesters, the 1% who controls nearly half of our nation’s wealth are starting to get antsy. Eric Cantor canceled a speech he was going to give about how income inequality isn’t really a big deal after he found out it would be open to the public (those icky icky poors were planning on attending). And Paul Ryan did a whole lot of double speak about about the dangers of moderate policy. Many conservatives still claim that in America, it doesn’t matter if you are born the son of a banker in Manhattan or the daughter of an unemployed mother of 5 in the Ozarks, if you work hard you’ll do just fine. But a new study shows what most of us already know, that upward mobility or as many call it, The American Dream, is in most cases, not realistic.

And that’s really why the Occupiers are so mad. It’s not that someone else got rich, it’s that they have so little control over their own destiny. After years of school and tens of thousands of dollars in student debt, all they have to show for it is a part time job at the mall, while the people who already have so much are raking it in faster than ever.

That message, that the 99% deserve to be rewarded for their work too, is scaring the 1%. Why else are we seeing scenes that look a lot more like Iran than America. In Oakland an Iraq War vet was shot in the face by a Police rubber bullet. He survived looking for nonexistent WMD’s in Iraq, but when fighting real live Mass Destruction like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America he ends up with a fractured skull. He probably enlisted with ideals like “defending our freedom”, but at home he isn’t allowed the freedom he thought he was protecting.

When scenes that looked like this happened overseas, The Obama administration was quick to condemn government violence against peaceful protesters. I wonder how long it will take to break there silence when it is happening to their own people. If I were a gambling man, I would bet ‘not soon.’