We are the 99%

Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America
by Writers For The 99%
Published 17 Dec 2011

This is not to say that we have always successfully adhered to the model set forth by the movement–our organization, like OWS, is an imperfect work in progress—but we have tried to observe its principles of direct democracy, consensus-based decision making, inclusiveness, and transparency. As we go to press with this book, at the beginning of December 2011, many aspects of the future course of Occupy Wall Street remain unclear. But one thing is starkly evident: Under the banner “We are the 99%”, the protest has given birth to America’s most important progressive movement since the civil rights marches half a century ago. We hope, in the pages that follow, to tell the story of that beginning. Beginnings “Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?” —Call from Adbusters, July 13th 2011 Occupy Wall Street is part of a global movement that has reached nearly every continent in the last year.

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Severely outnumbered, the handful of police on the bridge turned and walked toward Brooklyn, all the while shouting on their radios. As the march took the roadway, several protesters who had taken the pedestrian walk hopped the railing to join the occupation of the bridge. But as marchers swarmed the roadway chanting, “We are the 99 percent!” “Banks got bailed out! We got sold out!” and “Whose bridge? Our bridge!” the police quickly regrouped and established a barricade using the increasingly ubiquitous orange mesh fence, which was unfurled mid-span to stop them. Those near the front of the march, halted in their tracks, could not see the back of the march from the bridge’s center, but whispers began to circulate that the police had completely enclosed them.

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As the march kicked off, hundreds poured out of Washington Square’s southeastern corner. Bearing signs such as “Student Debt = Indentured Servitude,” “They Call It Class War Only When We Fight Back!,” “Why are so many out of work . . . When there is so much work to be done??,” and “We Want Our Future Back,” the marchers turned onto the sidewalks along Fourth Street, chanting “We! Are! The 99 percent!” They swarmed around food carts and by the plaza adjoining NYU’s Stern School of Business, where several students, some dressed in suits and ties, looked on with light-hearted skepticism. Initially the march stuck to the sidewalks, with only a handful of students walking in the streets alongside traffic.

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America
by Charlotte Alter
Published 18 Feb 2020

under thirty supported the movement: Public Policy Polling, “Americans See Occupy Movement Better Than Tea Party,” October 13, 2011, publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/PPP_Release_US_1013925.pdf. called “We Are the 99 Percent.”: “We Are the 99 Percent,” October 14, 2013, wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/. “doctor without health insurance.”: “We Are the 99 Percent,” 2, wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/page/2. “I’m taking my future back.”: “We Are the 99 Percent,” 2, wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/page/5. “and asked to borrow rent.”: “We Are the 99 Percent,” 5, wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/page/5. 750 cities around the world: Simon Rogers, “Occupy protests around the world: full lists visualised,” November 14, 2011, The Guardian, theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/oct/17/occupy-protests-world-list-map.

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Older people were more skeptical of Occupy, but roughly two in five Americans under thirty supported the movement. The internet allowed Occupy’s message to spread to exactly the people who needed to hear it. The phrase “We are the 99%” articulated a sense of mass collective solidarity that went viral almost immediately. Tumblr became a bulletin board of financial despair as young people began posting pictures of themselves online holding handwritten summaries of their debt on a page called “We Are the 99 Percent.” “I am a 21 year old college student. I have over $20,000 in student loans and more to go. The best job I can get pays me $7.50 an hour. I’ve been concerned that I may have a serious medical condition but am terrified of going to the doctor without health insurance.”

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This wasn’t an orator addressing a crowd—it was the voice of the crowd itself, sometimes halting, rarely eloquent, but a collective voice nonetheless. The sentences were short and digestible to maximize the efficiency, and they took on the quality of a call-and-response musical refrain, a kind of singsong solidarity. Mass power was their message (“We are the 99%”) but it was also their method. One sign even spelled it out: WE’RE HERE, WE’RE UNCLEAR, GET USED TO IT. Occupiers felt no need to sharpen their collective demands to a single concrete point, because any one demand might exclude hundreds of other priorities. There was no single objective but dozens, hundreds, or none, depending on whom you asked.

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age
by Manuel Castells
Published 19 Aug 2012

Available at: <http://www.fastcompany.com/1792974/why-occupy-wall-street-uses-vpns>. Wagstaff, K. (2012) Occupy the Internet: Protests give rise to DIY data networks. Techland, Time. Available at: <http://techland.time.com/2012/03/28/occupy-the-internet-protests-give-rise-to-diy-networks/>. Weinstein, A. (2011) “We are the 99%” creators revealed. Mother Jones. Available at: <http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/10/we-are-the-99-percent-creators>. On organization and decision-making in the camps Graeber, D. (2011a) Enacting the impossible (on consensus decision making). Occupy Wall Street. Available at: <http://occupywallst.org/article/enacting-the-impossible/>. Graeber, D. (2011b) Occupy Wall Street’s anarchist roots.

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The analysis by Gilad Lotan on Twitter traffic related to the movement shows that the peaks are associated with crucial moments in the movement, such as the first attempt to evict the occupation of Zuccotti Park on October 13.7 In most instances of threatened police action against occupations, Twitter networks alerted thousands, and their instant mobilization in solidarity played a role in protecting the occupiers. Using Twitter from their cell phones, the protesters were able to constantly distribute information, photos, videos and comments to build a real-time network of communication overlaid on the occupied space. The 99% theme was popularized, in large part, by the “We are the 99%” Tumblr page, started in mid-August, in advance of the September 17 protests, by Chris (who chose not to give his last name) and Priscilla Grim, who both work professionally in media in New York, and were involved in social activism. At first, both chose to remain anonymous, writing “Brought to you by the people who will Occupy Wall Street.”

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Tumblr allows users to be part of collaboratively produced group blogs. They can “reblog” others’ posts to post them onto their Tumblr blog and share the post with their own followers. And it is easy to implement a form that allows users to submit anonymous messages. This was crucial for the spread of the “We are the 99%” group because Tumblr provided a platform for personal storytelling in anonymity, with most people hiding their faces in the video, yet narrating their personal drama in coping with an unjust society. In October 2011, the group site was receiving about 100 submissions a day. As of February 2012 there were 225 pages of posts.

The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement
by David Graeber
Published 13 Aug 2012

a Specifics of how these consensus tools work will be covered in Chapter 4. b As a matter of historical record, since there is so much discussion of the origin of the slogan “We Are the 99 Percent,” the answer is that—appropriately enough—it was a collective creation. I threw in the 99 percent part, Begonia and Luis added the “we,” and the verb was ultimately by added by Chris, of Food Not Bombs, when he created the “We Are the 99 Percent” tumblr page a month later. c Though it’s worthwhile to point out this is untrue. The number would be more like 37th: New York City would come in just ahead of Tunisia, and just behind Portugal.

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Americans in either of those overlapping categories—the working class and underemployed graduates with crippling student loans—are actually paying more of their income to Wall Street than they pay to the government in taxes. Back in September, even before the occupation began, Chris—the Food Not Bombs activist who helped us create the first democratic circle in Bowling Green in August—set up a web page on tumblr called “We Are the 99 Percent,” where supporters could post pictures of themselves, holding up a brief account of their life situations. At the time of this writing there are more than 125 pages of these, their authors varying enormously in race, age, gender, and just about everything else. Recently there was an Internet discussion about the “ideology of the 99 percent” as revealed by these testimonies.

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How did there come to be such an enormous gap between the way so many Americans actually viewed the world—including a population of young people, most of whom were prepared to contemplate jettisoning the capitalist system entirely—and the opinions that could be expressed in its public forums? Why do the human stories revealed on the We Are the 99% tumblr never seem to make it to the TV, even in (or especially in) “reality” television? How, in a country that claims to be a democracy, did we arrive at a situation where—as the occupiers stressed—the political classes seem unwilling to even talk about the kind of issues and positions ordinary Americans actually held?

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank
by Chris Skinner
Published 27 Aug 2013

The result was that the movement rippled across America, with Occupy Seattle, Occupy San Francisco, Occupy Chicago and, shortly after, Occupy London, Occupy Sydney, Occupy Tokyo and more emerging. A global movement through Twitter and social media. The movement then gathered more focus through a website called “We are the 99%” on Tumblr, a social blogging service. The 99% are the masses of poor who have no wealth and see the 1% - the politicians, the bankers, the priests, the people in power – taking all the power and wealth from them. The movement was spawned by the birth of the Occupy movement, and describe themselves as: We are the 99%. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution.

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We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we’re working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1% is getting everything. We are the 99%. The story of how the 99% came around is that a New Yorker called Chris decided to publicise the Occupy Wall Street march that was due to take place on September 17th 2011 by asking people to put a photo of themselves holding a sign that explained their financial situation on the page he created called We are the 99 percent. Chris immediately forgot about the page and got on with other things but, four days later, came back and found hundreds of photos had been submitted.

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The photos being posted proved to have a major emotional impact, and the blog went viral with protestors adopting the phrase “We Are The 99 Per Cent” as a slogan, writing it on signs and banners. It is quite clear from the emergence of the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement and the 99% that these and many other social movements would just not exist in the same way without Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Change and the power of today’s social internet. Equally, the real revolution of these networks is that they allow critical mass of new movements to be linked globally within days, as demonstrated by the We are the 99% story. In banking, we see these changes occurring rapidly too.

What's the Matter with White People
by Joan Walsh
Published 19 Jul 2012

After a lifetime on the fractious American left, I felt stranded on the sidelines without a side: a civil rights integrationist stuck in a world of narrow boxes; a working-class Irish Catholic San Franciscan jousting with Beltway and Ivy League elites; an American who loves my country fighting charges that I’m un-American from an increasingly vicious right. One party, my own, had lost its spine; the other lost its mind. I knew that change lay in a broader definition of common ground, and I saw hope in the rising realization that “We are the 99 percent.” Yet if we are the 99 percent, why do we so often fail to get a majority of the country to listen to us? • • • I had the broad outlines of an answer, as others had put much of the evidence together before me. I’d seen it over and over. Democrats do best when they can unite around a vision of economic improvement for everybody; they get derailed when Republicans toss culture war grenades or play on race.

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Preface A few days after the Occupy Wall Street movement began to stir in September 2011, I walked the narrow streets of the world’s financial hub in a light rain, looking for a protest still too small to find. During the next few weeks, OWS would change the national conversation. The slogan “We are the 99 percent” did what years of complaint by economists and liberals could not: it focused attention on staggering income inequality and “the top 1 percent” who’d enriched themselves phenomenally during the past thirty years. “I am so scared of this anti–Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” Frank Luntz, the GOP’s master of spin, told a private meeting of Republican governors at the end of 2011.

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It seems as if we are continually having our attention drawn back to the same spot, trying to get democracy right, as we struggle over America’s place in the world. Certainly, democracy seemed to come alive again there, as the movement to wrest control of the country from Wall Street and the wealthiest 1 percent spread to hundreds of American cities and into other Western countries. “We are the 99 percent” became an updated version of e pluribus unum, “out of many, one.” I think about the Hard Hat Riot all these years later because it symbolized the culmination of a Republican political strategy that has worked nearly flawlessly for almost my entire life. No matter what’s going on in the world, the right can find a cultural issue that will get the left to fight itself, to atomize into little groups, and to give voice to factions that frighten Americans on the sidelines—often, the left-out white middle and working class—and the country winds up the worse for it.

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement
by Amy Lang and Daniel Lang/levitsky
Published 11 Jun 2012

* We believe that private and for-profit colleges and universities, which are largely financed through student debt, should open their books. * We believe that the current student debt load should be written off. In acknowledgment of these beliefs, I am signing the Debtors’ Pledge of Refusal. ♦ occupystudentdebtcampaign.org/pledges/ occupystudentdebtcampaign.org/our-principles/ WE ARE THE 99% The Mortville Declaration of Independence 5 October 2011 We, the people of Mortville, reject global capitalism and the consumer-based identities it imposes upon the populace. We acknowledge that race, class, gender and sexual orientation have been systematically transformed into marketing schemes to sell us our identities at the expense of the global poor and the human spirit.

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Republicans don’t rule. Corporations reign. Plutocrats decide. Finance capital rules. Capitalism works for the 1% and against the other 99%, and is therefore fundamentally illegitimate. Discredited are the nonsense phrases about how ‘government has to live within its means’, and ‘the rich are the job-creators’. ‘We are the 99%’ may not be deep analysis of political economy, but it’s a promising start, an open door, an invitation to investigate and explain how inequality and injustice are not bugs in the system, but have always been its basic features. These were utterances which six months ago were deemed outside and beyond sensible political discourse.

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One hears many such excuses, many distancing memes: it’s too white, those people are so privileged, they don’t speak for me. Even bracketing the illogic of applying ‘privilege’ to militant activists drenched in rain and freezing temperatures, these are flimsy apologetics. Occupy Wall Street has already inserted itself into every conversation in America, and it’s this level of rhetoric – we are the 99% – not the odd poster, that should concern us. If you don’t agree with the messaging, it’s on you to change it. If you feel it’s not diverse enough, add your body to the mix. In this consensus-based process, participation is our most valuable critical faculty. One should also recognize the instability of OWS as observable spectacle.

The Rich and the Rest of Us
by Tavis Smiley
Published 15 Feb 2012

It was Facebook postings, Twitter tweets, and other technological tools that engaged the world and legitimized the revolts in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, and elsewhere. In America, the wealthy one percent now find themselves in the grip of a highly contagious social-media campaign ignited by five undeniable and powerful words: “We are the 99 percent!” BREAKING FREE “Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.” —Carl Sagan Throughout American history, there have been proud moments of revolution that forced the elite to remove their blinders of greed, tyranny, and domination. A powerful British monarchy was blind to the unfair taxation and denial of basic liberties that bred revolt in the colonies.

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But Wall Street and politics are so tightly infused they couldn’t even draw the line at that moment, and that’s why we’ve reached a point where Wall Street abused the public, it abused the trust, it violated the laws, because every one of our big firms, whether it’s Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch or JP Morgan, they’re paying fines right now for what they did against the securities laws, and yet they’ve remained in charge.” The Occupy Wall Street key slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” is “rigorously accurate,” Sachs said. While “the rich have never been richer,” the government continues to give them preference while gutting services that poor people need for education, health care, and other vital necessities. Because the top 1 percent walked away with the prize, struggling Americans are fed up.

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People?
by John Kay
Published 2 Sep 2015

The ability of the senior employees of large corporations to appropriate significant fractions of corporate revenues for their own purposes mirrors, perhaps, the lavish lifestyle opportunities once exploited by prelates and courtiers. And so the combination of the bonus culture in the financial sector and its associated activities, a new generation of robber baron and the multimillionaire CEO has produced a reversal of the egalitarian trends of most of the twentieth century. ‘We are the 99 per cent’ was the slogan of the ‘Occupy’ protesters, drawing attention to the degree to which a small minority have benefited disproportionately during the era of financialisation. At the end of the First World War ‘the 1 per cent’ – the highest-earning percentile of the income distribution – received between 15 and 20 per cent of gross income.

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But there is no organisation that collects these voices.6 And I have come to believe that many people inside and outside the industry feel intimidated by what they perceive to be the pervasive (though publicly silent – they rarely engage in open debate) power and influence of global investment banks. That power and that influence ensure that fundamental structural reform of the financial sector is not a realistic short-term prospect. Yet it is intrinsic to oligarchy that oligarchs are a small minority, a point graphically made in the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ slogan of ‘We are the 99 per cent’. But it is easier to identify what the 99 per cent are against than what they are for. When I walked through St Paul’s Churchyard, incongruously placed in the centre of the City of London and the chosen site of Britain’s demonstrators, I located a sign saying ‘Ban High Frequency Trading’, but I could not find the author of the sign, or anyone who would engage in well-informed critique.

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.: Hyperion 220 Loomis, Carol 108 lotteries 65, 66, 68, 72 Lucas, Robert 40 Lynch, Dennios 108 Lynch, Peter 108, 109 M M-Pesa 186 Maastricht Treaty (1993) 243, 250 McCardie, Sir Henry 83, 84, 282, 284 McGowan, Harry 45 Machiavelli, Niccolò 224 McKinley, William 44 McKinsey 115, 126 Macy’s department store 46 Madoff, Bernard 29, 118, 131, 132, 177, 232, 293 Madoff Securities 177 Magnus, King of Sweden 196 Manhattan Island, New York: and Native American sellers 59, 63 Manne, Henry 46 manufacturing companies, rise of 45 Marconi 48 marine insurance 62, 63 mark-to-market accounting 126, 128–9, 320n22 mark-to-model approach 128–9, 320n21 Market Abuse Directive (MAD) 226 market economy 4, 281, 302, 308 ‘market for corporate control, the’ 46 market risk 97, 98, 177, 192 market-makers 25, 28, 30, 31 market-making 49, 109, 118, 136 Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MIFID) 226 Markkula, Mike 162, 166, 167 Markopolos, Harry 232 Markowitz, Harry 69 Markowitz model of portfolio allocation 68–9 Martin, Felix 323n5 martingale 130, 131, 136, 139, 190 Marx, Groucho 252 Marx, Karl 144, 145 Capital 143 Mary Poppins (film) 11, 12 MasterCard 186 Masters, Brooke 120 maturity transformation 88, 92 Maxwell, Robert 197, 201 Mayan civilisation 277 Meade, James 263 Means, Gardiner 51 Meeker, Mary 40, 167 Melamed, Leo 19 Mercedes 170 merchant banks 25, 30, 33 Meriwether, John 110, 134 Merkel, Angela 231 Merrill Lynch 135, 199, 293, 300 Merton, Robert 110 Metronet 159 Meyer, André 205 MGM 33 Microsoft 29, 167 middleman, role of the 80–87 agency and trading 82–3 analysts 86 bad intermediaries 81–2 from agency to trading 84–5 identifying goods and services required 80, 81 logistics 80, 81 services from financial intermediaries 80–81 supply chain 80, 81 transparency 84 ‘wisdom of crowds’ 86–7 Midland Bank 24 Milken, Michael 46, 292 ‘millennium bug’ 40 Miller, Bill 108, 109 Minuit, Peter 59, 63 Mises, Ludwig von 225 Mittelstand (medium-size business sector) 52, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172 mobile banking apps 181 mobile phone payment transfers 186–7 Modigliani-Miller theorem 318n9 monetarism 241 monetary economics 5 monetary policy 241, 243, 245, 246 money creation 88 money market fund 120–21 Moneyball phenomenon 165 monopolies 45 Monte Carlo casino 123 Monte dei Paschi Bank of Siena 24 Montgomery Securities 167 Moody’s rating agency 21, 248, 249, 313n6 moral hazard 74, 75, 76, 92, 95, 256, 258 Morgan, J.P. 44, 166, 291 Morgan Stanley 25, 40, 130, 135, 167, 268 Morgenthau, District Attorney Robert 232–3 mortality tables 256 mortgage banks 27 mortgage market fluctuation in mortgage costs 148 mechanised assessment 84–5 mortgage-backed securities 20, 21, 40, 85, 90, 100, 128, 130, 150, 151, 152, 168, 176–7, 284 synthetic 152 Mozilo, Angelo 150, 152, 154, 293 MSCI World Bank Index 135 muckraking 44, 54–5, 79 ‘mugus’ 118, 260 multinational companies, and diversification 96–7 Munger, Charlie 127 Munich, Germany 62 Munich Re 62 Musk, Elon 168 mutual funds 27, 108, 202, 206 mutual societies 30 mutualisation 79 mutuality 124, 213 ‘My Way’ (song) 72 N Napoleon Bonaparte 26 Napster 185 NASA 276 NASDAQ 29, 108, 161 National Economic Council (US) 5, 58 National Employment Savings Trust (NEST) 255 National Institutes of Health 167 National Insurance Fund (UK) 254 National Provincial Bank 24 National Science Foundation 167 National Westminster Bank 24, 34 Nationwide 151 Native Americans 59, 63 Nazis 219, 221 neo-liberal economic policies 39, 301 Netjets 107 Netscape 40 Neue Markt 170 New Deal 225 ‘new economy’ bubble (1999) 23, 34, 40, 42, 98, 132, 167, 199, 232, 280 new issue market 112–13 New Orleans, Louisiana: Hurricane Katrina disaster (2005) 79 New Testament 76 New York Stock Exchange 26–7, 28, 29, 31, 49, 292 New York Times 283 News of the World 292, 295 Newton, Isaac 35, 132, 313n18 Niederhoffer, Victor 109 NINJAs (no income, no job, no assets) 222 Nixon, Richard 36 ‘no arbitrage’ condition 69 non-price competition 112, 219 Norman, Montagu 253 Northern Rock 89, 90–91, 92, 150, 152 Norwegian sovereign wealth fund 161, 253 Nostradamus 274 O Obama, Barack 5, 58, 77, 194, 271, 301 ‘Obamacare’ 77 Occidental Petroleum 63 Occupy movement 52, 54, 312n2 ‘Occupy Wall Street’ slogan 305 off-balance-sheet financing 153, 158, 160, 210, 250 Office of Thrift Supervision 152–3 oil shock (1973–4) 14, 36–7, 89 Old Testament 75–6 oligarchy 269, 302–3, 305 oligopoly 118, 188 Olney, Richard 233, 237, 270 open market operations 244 options 19, 22 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 263 Osborne, George 328n19 ‘out of the money option’ 102, 103 Overend, Gurney & Co. 31 overseas assets and liabilities 179–80, 179 owner-managed businesses 30 ox parable xi-xii Oxford University 12 P Pacific Gas and Electric 246 Pan Am 238 Paris financial centre 26 Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards 295 partnerships 30, 49, 50, 234 limited liability 313n14 Partnoy, Frank 268 passive funds 99, 212 passive management 207, 209, 212 Patek Philippe 195, 196 Paulson, Hank 300 Paulson, John 64, 109, 115, 152, 191, 284 ‘payment in kind’ securities 131 payment protection policies 198 payments system 6, 7, 25, 180, 181–8, 247, 259–60, 281, 297, 306 PayPal 167, 168, 187 Pecora, Ferdinand 25 Pecora hearings (1932–34) 218 peer-to-peer lending 81 pension funds 29, 98, 175, 177, 197, 199, 200, 201, 208, 213, 254, 282, 284 pension provision 78, 253–6 pension rights 53, 178 Perkins, Charles 233 perpetual inventory method 321n4 Perrow, Charles 278, 279 personal financial management 6, 7 personal liability 296 ‘petrodollars’ 14, 37 Pfizer 96 Pierpoint Morgan, J. 165 Piper Alpha oil rig disaster (1987) 63 Ponzi, Charles 131, 132 Ponzi schemes 131, 132, 136, 201 pooled investment funds 197 portfolio insurance 38 Potts, Robin, QC 61, 63, 72, 119, 193 PPI, mis-selling of 296 Prebble, Lucy: ENRON 126 price competition 112, 219 price discovery 226 price mechanism 92 Prince, Chuck 34 private equity 27, 98, 166, 210 managers 210, 289 private insurance 76, 77 private sector 78 privatisation 39, 78, 157, 158, 258, 307 probabilistic thinking 67, 71, 79 Procter & Gamble 69, 108 product innovation 13 property and infrastructure 154–60 protectionism 13 Prudential 200 public companies, conversion to 18, 31–2, 49 public debt 252 public sector 78 Q Quandt, Herbert 170 Quandt Foundation 170 quantitative easing 245, 251 quantitative style 110–11 quants 22, 107, 110 Quattrone, Frank 167, 292–3 queuing 92 Quinn, Sean 156 R railroad regulation 237 railway mania (1840s) 35 Raines, Franklin 152 Rajan, Raghuram 56, 58, 79, 102 Rakoff, Judge Jed 233, 294, 295 Ramsey, Frank 67, 68 Rand, Ayn 79, 240 ‘random walk’ 69 Ranieri, Lew 20, 22, 106–7, 134, 152 rating agencies 21, 41, 84–5, 97, 151, 152, 153, 159, 249–50 rationality 66–7, 68 RBS see Royal Bank of Scotland re-insurance 62–3 Reagan, Ronald 18, 23, 54, 59, 240 real economy 7, 18, 57, 143, 172, 190, 213, 226, 239, 271, 280, 288, 292, 298 redundancy 73, 279 Reed, John 33–4, 48, 49, 50, 51, 242, 293, 314n40 reform 270–96 other people’s money 282–5 personal responsibility 292–6 principles of 270–75 the reform of structure 285–92 robust systems and complex structures 276–81 regulation 215, 217–39 the Basel agreements 220–25 and competition 113 the origins of financial regulation 217–19 ‘principle-based’ 224 the regulation industry 229–33 ‘rule-based’ 224 securities regulation 225–9 what went wrong 233–9 ‘Regulation Q’ (US) 13, 14, 20, 28, 120, 121 regulatory agencies 229, 230, 231, 235, 238, 274, 295, 305 regulatory arbitrage 119–24, 164, 223, 250 regulatory capture 237, 248, 262 Reich, Robert 265, 266 Reinhart, C.M. 251 relationship breakdown 74, 79 Rembrandts, genuine/fake 103, 127 Renaissance Technologies 110, 111, 191 ‘repo 105’ arbitrage 122 repo agreement 121–2 repo market 121 Reserve Bank of India 58 Reserve Primary Fund 121 Resolution Trust Corporation 150 retirement pension 78 return on equity (RoE) 136–7, 191 Revelstoke, first Lord 31 risk 6, 7, 55, 56–79 adverse selection and moral hazard 72–9 analysis by ‘ketchup economists’ 64 chasing the dream 65–72 Geithner on 57–8 investment 256 Jackson Hole symposium 56–7 Kohn on 56 laying bets on the interpretation of incomplete information 61 and Lloyd’s 62–3 the LMX spiral 62–3, 64 longevity 256 market 97, 98 mitigation 297 randomness 76 socialisation of individual risks 61 specific 97–8 risk management 67–8, 72, 79, 137, 191, 229, 233, 234, 256 risk premium 208 risk thermostat 74–5 risk weighting 222, 224 risk-pooling 258 RJR Nabisco 46, 204 ‘robber barons’ 44, 45, 51–2 Robertson, Julian 98, 109, 132 Robertson Stephens 167 Rockefeller, John D. 44, 52, 196 Rocket Internet 170 Rogers, Richard 62 Rogoff, K.S. 251 rogue traders 130, 300 Rohatyn, Felix 205 Rolls-Royce 90 Roman empire 277, 278 Rome, Treaty of (1964) 170 Rooney, Wayne 268 Roosevelt, Franklin D. v, 25, 235 Roosevelt, Theodore 43–4, 235, 323n1 Rothschild family 217 Royal Bank of Scotland 11, 12, 14, 24, 26, 34, 78, 91, 103, 124, 129, 135, 138, 139, 211, 231, 293 Rubin, Robert 57 In an Uncertain World 67 Ruskin, John 60, 63 Unto this Last 56 Russia defaults on debts 39 oligarchies 303 Russian Revolution (1917) 3 S Saes 168 St Paul’s Churchyard, City of London 305 Salomon Bros. 20, 22, 27, 34, 110, 133–4 ‘Salomon North’ 110 Salz Review: An Independent Review of Barclays’ Business Practices 217 Samuelson, Paul 208 Samwer, Oliver 170 Sarkozy, Nicolas 248, 249 Savage, L.J. 67 Scholes, Myron 19, 69, 110 Schrödinger’s cat 129 Scottish Parliament 158 Scottish Widows 26, 27, 30 Scottish Widows Fund 26, 197, 201, 212, 256 search 195, 209, 213 defined 144 and the investment bank 197 Second World War 36, 221 secondary markets 85, 170, 210 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 20, 64, 126, 152, 197, 225, 226, 228, 230, 232, 247, 292, 293, 294, 313n6 securities regulation 225–9 securitisation 20–21, 54, 100, 151, 153, 164, 169, 171, 222–3 securitisation boom (1980s) 200 securitised loans 98 See’s Candies 107 Segarra, Carmen 232 self-financing companies 45, 179, 195–6 sell-side analysts 199 Sequoia Capital 166 Shad, John S.R. 225, 228–9 shareholder value 4, 45, 46, 50, 211 Sharpe, William 69, 70 Shell 96 Sherman Act (1891) 44 Shiller, Robert 85 Siemens 196 Siemens, Werner von 196 Silicon Valley, California 166, 167, 168, 171, 172 Simon, Hermann 168 Simons, Jim 23, 27, 110, 111–12, 124 Sinatra, Frank 72 Sinclair, Upton 54, 79, 104, 132–3 The Jungle 44 Sing Sing maximum-security gaol, New York 292 Skilling, Jeff 126, 127, 128, 149, 197, 259 Slim, Carlos 52 Sloan, Alfred 45, 49 Sloan Foundation 49 small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), financing 165–72, 291 Smith, Adam 31, 51, 60 The Wealth of Nations v, 56, 106 Smith, Greg 283 Smith Barney 34 social security 52, 79, 255 Social Security Trust Fund (US) 254, 255 socialism 4, 225, 301 Société Générale 130 ‘soft commission’ 29 ‘soft’ commodities 17 Soros, George 23, 27, 98, 109, 111–12, 124, 132 South Sea Bubble (18th century) 35, 132, 292 sovereign wealth funds 161, 253 Soviet empire 36 Soviet Union 225 collapse of 23 lack of confidence in supplies 89–90 Spain: property bubble 42 Sparks, D.L. 114, 283, 284 specific risk 97–8 speculation 93 Spitzer, Eliot 232, 292 spread 28, 94 Spread Networks 2 Square 187 Stamp Duty 274 Standard & Poor’s rating agency 21, 99, 248, 249, 313n6 Standard Life 26, 27, 30 standard of living 77 Standard Oil 44, 196, 323n1 Standard Oil of New Jersey (later Exxon) 323n1 Stanford University 167 Stanhope 158 State Street 200, 207 sterling devaluation (1967) 18 stewardship 144, 163, 195–203, 203, 208, 209, 210, 211, 213 Stewart, Jimmy 12 Stigler, George 237 stock exchanges 17 see also individual stock exchanges stock markets change in organisation of 28 as a means of taking money out of companies 162 rise of 38 stock-picking 108 stockbrokers 16, 25, 30, 197, 198 Stoll, Clifford 227–8 stone fei (in Micronesia) 323n5 Stone, Richard 263 Stora Enso 196 strict liability 295–6 Strine, Chancellor Leo 117 structured investment vehicles (SIVs) 158, 223 sub-prime lending 34–5, 75 sub-prime mortgages 63, 75, 109, 149, 150, 169, 244 Summers, Larry 22, 55, 73, 119, 154, 299 criticism of Rajan’s views 57 ‘ketchup economics’ 5, 57, 69 support for financialisation 57 on transformation of investment banking 15 Sunday Times 143 ‘Rich List’ 156 supermarkets: financial services 27 supply chain 80, 81, 83, 89, 92 Surowiecki, James: The Wisdom of Crowds xi swap markets 21 SWIFT clearing system 184 Swiss Re 62 syndication 62 Syriza 306 T Taibbi, Matt 55 tailgating 102, 103, 104, 128, 129, 130, 136, 138, 140, 152, 155, 190–91, 200 Tainter, Joseph 277 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas 125, 183 Fooled by Randomness 133 Tarbell, Ida 44, 54 TARGET2 system 184, 244 TARP programme 138 tax havens 123 Taylor, Martin 185 Taylor Bean and Whitaker 293 Tea Party 306 technological innovation 13, 185, 187 Tel Aviv, Israel 171 telecommunications network 181, 182 Tesla Motors 168 Tetra 168 TfL 159 Thai exchange rate, collapse of (1997) 39 Thain, John 300 Thatcher, Margaret 18, 23, 54, 59, 148, 151, 157 Thiel, Peter 167 Third World debt problem 37, 131 thrifts 25, 149, 150, 151, 154, 174, 290, 292 ticket touts 94–5 Tobin, James 273 Tobin tax 273–4 Tolstoy, Count Leo 97 Tonnies, Ferdinand 17 ‘too big to fail’ 75, 140, 276, 277 Tourre, Fabrice ‘Fabulous Fab’ 63–4, 115, 118, 232, 293, 294 trader model 82, 83 trader, rise of the 16–24 elements of the new trading culture 21–2 factors contributing to the change 17–18 foreign exchange 18–19 from personal relationships to anonymous markets 17 hedge fund managers 23 independent traders 22–3 information technology 19–20 regulation 20 securitisation 20–21 shift from agency to trading 16 trading as a principal source of revenue and remuneration 17 trader model 82, 83 ‘trading book’ 320n20 transparency 29, 84, 205, 210, 212, 226, 260 Travelers Group 33, 34, 48 ‘treasure islands’ 122–3 Treasuries 75 Treasury (UK) 135, 158 troubled assets relief program 135 Truman, Harry S. 230, 325n13 trust 83–4, 85, 182, 213, 218, 260–61 Tuckett, David 43, 71, 79 tulip mania (1630s) 35 Turner, Adair 303 TWA 238 Twain, Mark: Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar 95–6 Twitter 185 U UBS 33, 134 UK Independence Party 306 unemployment 73, 74, 79 unit trusts 202 United States global dominance of the finance industry 218 house prices 41, 43, 149, 174 stock bubble (1929) 201 universal banks 26–7, 33 University of Chicago 19, 69 ‘unknown unknowns’ 67 UPS delivery system 279–80 US Defense Department 167 US Steel 44 US Supreme Court 228, 229, 304 US Treasury 36, 38, 135 utility networks 181–2 V value discovery 226–7 value horizon 109 Van Agtmael, Antoine 39 Vanderbilt, Cornelius 44 Vanguard 200, 207, 213 venture capital 166 firms 27, 168 venture capitalists 171, 172 Vickers Commission 194 Viniar, David 204–5, 233, 282, 283, 284 VISA 186 volatility 85, 93, 98, 103, 131, 255 Volcker, Paul 150, 181 Volcker Rule 194 voluntary agencies 258 W wagers and credit default swaps 119 defined 61 at Lloyd’s coffee house 71–2 lottery tickets 65 Wall Street, New York 1, 16, 312n2 careers in 15 rivalry with London 13 staffing of 217 Wall Street Crash (1929) 20, 25, 27, 36, 127, 201 Wall Street Journal 294 Wallenberg family 108 Walmart 81, 83 Warburg 134 Warren, Elizabeth 237 Washington consensus 39 Washington Mutual 135, 149 Wasserstein, Bruce 204, 205 Watergate affair 240 ‘We are the 99 per cent’ slogan 52, 305 ‘We are Wall Street’ 16, 55, 267–8, 271, 300, 301 Weber, Max 17 Weill, Sandy 33–4, 35, 48–51, 55, 91, 149, 293, 314n40 Weinstock, Arnold 48 Welch, Jack 45–6, 48, 50, 52, 126, 314n40 WestLB 169 Westminster Bank 24 Whitney, Richard 292 Wilson, Harold 18 windfall payments 14, 32, 127, 153, 290 winner’s curse 103, 104, 156, 318n11 Winslow Jones, Alfred 23 Winton Capital 111 Wolfe, Humbert 7 The Uncelestial City 1 Wolfe, Tom 268 The Bonfire of the Vanities 16, 22 women traders 22 Woodford, Neil 108 Woodward, Bob: Maestro 240 World Bank 14, 220 World.Com bonds 197 Wozniak, Steve 162 Wriston, Walter 37 Y Yellen, Janet 230–31 Yom Kippur War (1973) 36 YouTube 185 Z Zurich, Switzerland 62

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement
by Fredrik Deboer
Published 4 Sep 2023

They took over the park—they occupied Wall Street—and in so doing created a spectacle of resistance that attracted the attention of a country that was simmering with resentment toward the financial industry. The protesters were an eclectic bunch, drawn from all manner of organizations and groups rather than from any one in particular. They spoke of a broken and rigged economy, a system designed to enrich the rich while leaving the rest of us behind. It was at Occupy that the “We Are the 99 Percent” slogan was first given national attention, meaning the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution, whose interests (said the protesters) were inherently antagonistic to the richest 1 percent. The slogan neatly captured the class dynamics that the protesters gathered to decry. Another slogan was popularized there, a much less widely publicized slogan but one with admirable style: “Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit.”

…

This is the fundamental appeal of all true-left politics. Everyone has to pay the rent. Almost everyone has lean months and hard years. Many people struggle to afford groceries; everybody, at some stage, feels wronged by the boss but unable to do anything about it. I have my misgivings about the “We Are the 99 Percent” framing that emerged from Occupy; in my first book, I argued that we must pay equal attention to the divide between the bottom 80 percent and the top 20 percent, given the way that the top quintile (my quintile) has pulled away from the rest of the country. But the basic wisdom that impossibly wealthy individuals and institutions have rigged the deck against the common man is as true as it has ever been and represents a great messaging opportunity.

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events
by Robert J. Shiller
Published 14 Oct 2019

Bitcoin and the Fear of Inequality In addition to tapping into anarchist sentiment and the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin story is a story of the desire for economic empowerment. During the twenty-first century, as economic inequality in advanced countries has increased rapidly, many people feel helpless, and they desire greater control over their economic lives. Bitcoin prices first took off around the time of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street / “We are the 99%” protests. Adbusters, a social activist organization that wanted its message to go viral, launched these protests in the United States, and Occupy protests occurred in many other countries too. It is no coincidence that the Bitcoin narrative is one of individual empowerment, because, according to the narrative, the coins are anonymous and free of government control, management, and reach.

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Notably, 2012 was the same year that home prices in the United States started rising sharply again after the 2007–9 world financial crisis. It was also the year in which the police finally cleared the Occupy Wall Street movement, which had started a year earlier, from Zuccotti Park in New York City. The movement had been attracting much attention to the slogan “We Are the 99%,” referring to the majority of the population who cannot live extravagantly, in a public assertion that these people matter. The “Mansion” section seemed to scream that the top 1% mattered even more. It featured lush photo spreads of lavish homes and their pretentious occupants in a tone of gushing admiration.

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See also labor unions Wagner, Robert, 184 Walker, Edmond, 250 Wall Street Journal “Mansion” section, 224–25 Wanniski, Jude, 44–45 war metaphors, 17 Warner/Chappell Music, 98 wars: inflation during, 265–66. See also Civil War, US; World War I; World War II war to end all wars, 242 Washington, George, 100–101, 102, 117, 177 Washington Mutual (WaMu) bank run, 135 Watson, IBM computer on Jeopardy, 207 The Way the World Works (Wanniski), 44 “We are the 99%” protests of 2011, 8, 225 weather forecasting, 123–25 Weems, Mason Locke, 100 Weiman, Rita, 139 Welch, Ivo, 300 welfare mother, narrative on, 49–50 When Washington Shut Down Wall Street (Silber), 94 Whewell, William, 12 White, Hayden, 37 Whitman, Walt, 165 Wicked (Broadway musical), 172 Wicked (Maguire), 172 Wikipedia, 7 Wikiquotes, 102 wikis, 7 Williams, James D., 147 Wilson, E.

The Myth of Meritocracy: Why Working-Class Kids Still Get Working-Class Jobs (Provocations Series)
by James Bloodworth
Published 18 May 2016

Why, after all, should ordinary people suffer when a small minority appear to be doing so well? Originating in a 2006 documentary about the growing gap between a wealthy American elite and the rest of society, the term ‘1 per cent’ has spawned an extensive literature on both sides of the Atlantic. Its corollary – ‘We are the 99 per cent’ – was the slogan adopted by the influential anti-capitalist protest movement Occupy Wall St. Political grumbling about inequality never went away, of course, but the global financial crash of 2008 dragged it firmly back into the mainstream. A cataclysm largely caused by the reckless lending of American banks was – and in fact still is – being paid for by austerity programmes that disproportionately hit the poorest.

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
by Bhaskar Sunkara
Published 1 Feb 2019

Even some of Occupy’s most radical-sounding sound bites had mainstream, even genteel, roots. The slogan “We are the 99 percent, they are the 1 percent” might have found its wings in Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, but its origins actually lie in a May 2011 Vanity Fair article by retired World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz. The call captured popular discontent, and even the Congressional Budget Office seized on the phrase in a report issued about a month after Occupy began.10 “We are the 99 percent” resonated for a reason. Between 1979 and 2007, income for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans increased by 275 percent, or a total of $700,000 in new annual income, on average.

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It
by Timothy Noah
Published 23 Apr 2012

A chart showing this found its way into President Obama’s first budget, prompting the Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger to call it “the most politically potent squiggle along an axis since Arthur Laffer drew his famous curve on a napkin in the mid-1970s.” But where Laffer’s squiggle was an argument to lower taxes, Piketty and Saez’s (the conservative Henninger noted with some dismay) was an argument to raise them on the rich.6 It was also what later inspired 2011’s Occupy Wall Street protest slogan, “We are the 99 percent.” • The top 0.1 percent (Really and Stinking; today, everybody making at least $1.7 million) tripled their share of the national income during the Great Divergence, from 3 to 10 percent. • The top 0.01 percent (Stinking; today, everybody making at least $9.1 million) nearly quadrupled their share of the national income during the Great Divergence, from 1.4 to 5 percent.7 Notice a pattern?

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Ellen Byron, “As Middle Class Shrinks, P&G Aims High and Low,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 12, 2001, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904836104576558861943984924.html. Sam Grobart, “Bells and Whistles Descend upon the Throne,” New York Times, Oct. 12, 2011. Don Peck, Pinched: How the Great Recession Has Narrowed Our Futures & What We Can Do About It (New York: Crown, 2011), 100. “We Are the 99 Percent,” Web testimonials, Oct. 13, 2011, accessed Oct. 14, 2011, at http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/page/2. 1. Alan Blinder, “The Level and Distribution of Economic Well-Being,” Working Paper 488 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1980), 2. Hereafter the National Bureau of Economic Research will be referred to as NBER. 2.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

I talked with the protesters to hear their stories firsthand; I participated in the “people’s microphone,” the clever technique used to get around the ban on amplified sound. Every speaker addressing the crowd paused at the end of each phrase, giving those nearby time to repeat it aloud, with the volume amplified by many voices so that those farther away could hear. The rallying cry of the movement was “We are the 99%,” a slogan coined by two online activists to highlight the realization, which had recently penetrated the popular consciousness, that 1% of the US population now earned 25% of the national income and owned 40% of its wealth. They began a campaign on Tumblr, a short-form blogging site with hundreds of millions of users.

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My husband’s fuel costs are almost one of his bi-weekly paychecks. We are in a loss mitigation and loan modification program with our mortgage lender, and struggling with everything we have to keep our little house. I got a 2% raise in June, but my paycheck actually got smaller because my health insurance costs went up. We are the 99%.” “I have had no job for over 2½ years. Black men have a 20% unemployment rate. I am 33 years old. Born and raised in Watts. I am the 99%.” “I am nineteen. I have wanted kids in my future for a long time. Now I am scared that the future will not be an OK place for my kids. I am the 99%.” “I am retired.

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Hancock, “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 17, 2014, updated with PNAS “Editorial Expression of Concern and Correction,” July 22, 2014, http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full.pdf. 227 “we are all lab rats”: Vindu Goel, “Facebook Tinkers with Users’ Emotions in News Feed Experiment, Stirring Outcry,” New York Times, June 29, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/face book-tinkers-with-users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry.html. 228 with apologies to Pedro Domingos: This is a reference to the title of Domingos’s book, The Master Algorithm (New York: Basic Books, 2015). 228 “damn good for CBS”: Eliza Collins, “Les Moonves: Trump’s Run Is ‘Damn Good for CBS,’” Politico, June 29, 2016, http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/02/les-moonves-trump-cbs-220001. CHAPTER 11: OUR SKYNET MOMENT 230 The messages were powerful and personal: “We Are the 99 Percent,” tumblr.com, September 14, 2011, http://weare the99percent.tumblr.com/page/231. 231 “AI systems must do what we want them to do”: “An Open Letter: Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence,” Future of Life Institute, retrieved April 1, 2017, https://futureoflife.org/ai-open-letter/. 231 “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return”: Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and OpenAI, “Introducing OpenAI,” OpenAI Blog, December 11, 2015, https://blog.openai.com/introduc ing-openai/. 232 best friend of one autistic boy: Judith Newman, “To Siri, with Love,” New York Times, October 17, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/fashion/how-apples-siri-became-one-autistic-boys-bff.html. 234 overpopulation on Mars: “Andrew Ng: Why ‘Deep Learning’ Is a Mandate for Humans, Not Just Machines,” Wired, May 2015, retrieved April 1, 2017, https://www.wired.com/brandlab/2015/05/andrew-ng-deep-learning-mandate-humans-not-just-machines/. 235 change how we think and how we feel: Emeran A.

The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money
by Frederik Obermaier
Published 17 Jun 2016

It’s the family offices, asset management companies, banks, investment advisers, tax experts, and of course Mossack Fonseca itself. All for the 1 per cent. [ ] One per cent. From that figure, an established political term has evolved to denote the richest 1 per cent of a country. In the US, the term was turned on its head to provide the slogan of a political movement: ‘We are the 99%’. This was chanted by supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement; ‘99%’ was scrawled across placards and banners. It was an outcry against the excesses and omnipotence of capitalism, the type of outcry that’s rare today. In his bestseller The Unwinding, US author George Packer describes, precisely and without getting worked up, how the financial elite have dominated the US economy, the absurd repercussions this has for the rest of the country and why citizens who weren’t previously especially politically engaged suddenly got involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement: because they felt betrayed by ‘them up there’.

…

Everything was going well for us, but then at the end of 2006, I became pregnant and had to stay in bed for four months due to pre-eclampsia. During this time, I was fired. 2011: We’ve sold all our possessions to give our daughter what she needs. I can’t find another job. Our house has just been sold in a forced auction. I AM SCARED. WE ARE THE 99%.’ Why are we telling you this? Because so far, we haven’t found anyone like this woman in our data. And it wouldn’t be too wild to assume that we won’t be finding people like her in our data in the future. The more complicated and opaque offshore structures are, the more expensive they are.

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism
by Peter Frase
Published 10 Mar 2015

What is so dangerous, rather, is the way they manifest themselves in an economy dedicated to maximizing profits and growth, and in which money and power are held in the hands of a tiny elite. The growing inequality of wealth and income in the world has become an increasing focus of attention from activists, politicians, and pundits. Occupy Wall Street struck a chord with the slogan “we are the 99 percent,” drawing attention to the fact that almost all the gains from economic growth in recent decades have accrued to 1 percent or less of the population. Economist Thomas Piketty scored an improbable best seller with Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a massive treatise about the history of wealth and the prospect of an increasingly unequal world.22 The two crises I’ve described are fundamentally about inequality as well.

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 15 Mar 2015

The resulting article, “Of the 1 Percent, by the 1 Percent, for the 1 Percent,” did have a far wider readership than my Econometrica article decades earlier. The new social order that my Vanity Fair article discussed—the 99 percent of Americans who were in the same stagnating boat—became the slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement: “We are the 99 percent.” It presented the thesis that reverberates through the articles here and my subsequent writing: almost all of us, including many in the 1 percent, would actually be better off if there were less inequality. It was in the enlightened self-interest of the 1 percent to help construct a less divided society.

…

He has worked closely with me on all of the articles I have written for Vanity Fair, of which four are included here. Most importantly for this volume, he solicited and worked diligently with me in writing the article “Of the 1 Percent, by the 1 Percent, for the 1 Percent,” which, in turn, gave rise to my book The Price of Inequality and this book. Graydon Carter suggested the title for that article. “We are the 99%” became the slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement, symbolizing America’s Great Divide. The arrangements I made with Project Syndicate, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and a host of other media, reflected in the articles collected here, gave me the opportunity to express my views on what was happening in the world—to be a pundit, perhaps more thoughtful than those who are forced to offer their opinions on a huge range of topics on the Sunday morning shows, because I could both choose my topics and mull over the answers.

Think Complexity
by Allen B. Downey
Published 23 Feb 2012

The Occupy Movement Wealth inequality has partly fueled a modern social movement known as the Occupy movement. The first significant Occupy protest was on Wall Street in New York City, where thousands of protesters gathered to express their dismay with the distribution of wealth, among other things. The movement’s motto is “We are the 99%,” reminding politicians to serve the majority, not the 1% who control more than a third of the nation’s wealth. A major goal of the movement is to achieve a more equal distribution of income, which protesters hope to accomplish by implementing a more progressive tax policy. One of the effects of taxation is to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor.

Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis
by Benjamin Kunkel
Published 11 Mar 2014

They are indignant at being made to repair their governments’ books through higher taxes and reduced salaries and benefits. In Chile, excessive interest rates on student loans figured among the main grievances in demonstrations throughout the southern winter. And the Occupy movement in the US—whose slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” was reportedly first floated by Graeber himself—has condemned not only the maldistribution of wealth but the related vice of massive consumer debt, in the form of mortgages, student loans, and usurious interest rates on credit cards. Generally speaking, the 1 percent lends and the rest borrow.

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics
by John B. Judis
Published 11 Sep 2016

It suggested coming up with “a deceptively simple Trojan Horse demand . . . that is impossible for President Obama to ignore.” The organizers failed to come up with a single demand—there seemed to be too many of them, most of which demanded an end to the reign of neoliberalism—but on a new Occupy Wall Street website, they came up with a simple slogan, borrowed from the original AmpedStatus post, “We are the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.” That slogan, which framed the protest in populist terms, defined the movement as an attack on growing political and economic inequality. On September 17, somewhere over a thousand demonstrators showed up and about 300 ended up camping out on Zuccotti Park.

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It
by Richard V. Reeves
Published 22 May 2017

Some humility and generosity is required. But there is clearly some work to do in terms of raising awareness. Right now, there is something of a culture of entitlement among America’s upper middle class. Partly this is because of a natural tendency to compare ourselves to those even better off than us. This is the “we are the 99 percent” problem. But it is also because we feel entitled to our position since it results from our own merit: our education, brains, and hard work. These problems were illuminated by the 529 furor. Veteran tax scholar Howard Gleckman noted sadly that the demise of Obama’s plan “reflected the lack of serious interest in reform by most lawmakers today.”6 I think it reflected something much worse.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
by Gary Gerstle
Published 14 Oct 2022

More and more of them had turned to political organizing, mobilizing to fight municipal budget cuts, to purge excessive money from politics, to relieve millions of young people from the crushing burden of student debt, and to seek ways to reimpose regulation on financial markets. Organizers from among the militants in their ranks met in New York in August to design an action and devise a slogan by which they would be known. “We are the 99 percent” was the phrase they embraced. In making this declaration, they were announcing their readiness to take their stand against the wealthy 1 percent. The widening economic inequality of American life, the architects of this slogan charged, had reached grotesque proportions. It had to be stopped, and then reversed.55 Many rallying to the “99 percent” slogan were new to politics.

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Frequently members of the small police detail dispatched to the scene joined in. Impromptu musical jamming and drum sessions were common. The mood was both serious and festive.57 In a nation that, during its neoliberal heyday, had decried “class warfare”—pitting one class against another—the slogan “We are the 99 percent” proved surprisingly appealing. Some of that appeal had to do with the slogan’s anodyne nature: Virtually every American could claim membership in the 99 percent and thus escape the censure of being part of the despised 1 percent. But part of the slogan’s appeal worked in just the opposite way.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism
by Edward Luce
Published 20 Apr 2017

Orbán now boasts that Hungary is an ‘illiberal democracy’. In his masterful survey of populism, Jan-Werner Müller takes up cudgels against those who argue populism is democratic. A true populist is not just opposed to the elites, he is also an enemy of pluralism. Without a plural society democracy loses its foundation. The populist never says ‘We are the 99 per cent,’ as Occupy Wall Street did during its Zuccotti Park protests. The populist claims to speak exclusively for the 100 per cent. Only they can know the identity of the true people. The Finnish populists began life as the True Finns. Today they are simply the Finns. The change of name is a measure of their success.

Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression
by Geoff Cox and Alex McLean
Published 9 Nov 2012

We are Legion.”8 Most recently (since 17 September 2011), the Occupy Wall 70 Chapter 3 Street movement, with its rapid spread to other parts of the world, also seems apposite in its reappropriation of common space in places where financial power is centered (squatting its symbolic sites, to express indignation about the handling of the financial crisis since 2008).9 Adopting the “#Occupy” hashtag,10 the wider Occupy movement is described in terms that embody publicness in a wayward culture of financial calculation and social inequality: “We are the 99%.”11 Perhaps it can be claimed that the concept of publicness has itself been occupied in these recent events. Both examples serve to underscore Arendt’s view that the political realm necessarily arises out of acting together, as a plurality of unique individuals, in “the sharing of words and deeds.”12 It is collective activity that relies on the infinite capacity to speak freely and act in public, and this is what constitutes publicness in her terms.

Who Stole the American Dream?
by Hedrick Smith
Published 10 Sep 2012

They gave voice to a populist protest against concentrated power and wealth in America, and much of the public responded positively to their message. In a few short weeks, the Occupy movement, inchoate as it was, not only changed the public dialogue on economic issues, but implanted in America’s political lexicon a vivid, Twitter-easy slogan—“We are the 99 percent”—opposing the richest 1 percent—a slogan that frames a central issue for election-year politics and policy makers in Washington. But lasting change in America will require a broader movement that is more deeply rooted, better organized, and more politically clear about a short list of policy goals.

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Plants,” The Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2012. 46 “The American people themselves” Gardner, “American Experiment.” 47 More than half “Tea Party House Members Even Wealthier than Other GOP Lawmakers,” Center for Responsive Politics, January 4, 2012, http://​www.​opensecrets.​org/​news/​2012/​01/​tea-​party-​house-​members-​wealthy-​gop.​html. 48 “We are the 99 percent” Brian Stelter, “Camps Are Cleared but ’99 Percent’ Still Occupies the Lexicon,” The New York Times, November 30, 2011. 49 “Powerful thrust of energy” Gardner, “American Experiment.” PART 1: POWER SHIFT 1 Powell’s personal manner Linda Greenhouse, “Lewis Powell, Crucial Centrist Justice, Dies at 90,” The New York Times, August 26, 1998.

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 10 Jun 2012

It was the banks. And it is the bankers who have gone, almost to a person, free. If no one is accountable, if no individual can be blamed for what has happened, it means that the problem lies in the economic and political system. From social cohesion to class warfare The slogan “we are the 99 percent” may have marked an important turning point in the debate about inequality in the United States. Americans have always shied away from class analysis; America, we liked to believe, is a middle-class country, and that belief helps bind us together. There should be no divisions between the upper and the lower classes, between the bourgeoisie and the workers.8 But if by a class-based society we mean one in which the prospects of those at the bottom to move up are low, America may have become even more class-based than old Europe, and our divisions have now become even greater than those there.9 Those in the 99 percent are continuing with the “we’re all middle class” tradition, with one slight modification: they recognize that we’re actually not all moving up together.

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They are an expression of frustration with the political system and even, in those countries where there are elections, with the electoral process. They sound an alarm. In some ways the protesters have already accomplished a great deal: think tanks, government agencies, and the media have confirmed their allegations, the failures not just of the market system but of the high and unjustifiable level of inequality. The expression “we are the 99 percent” has entered into popular consciousness. No one can be sure where the movements will lead. But of this we can be sure: these young protesters have already altered public discourse and the consciousness of ordinary citizens and politicians alike. CONCLUDING COMMENTS In the weeks following the protest movements in Tunisia and Egypt, I wrote (in an early draft of my Vanity Fair article), As we gaze out at the popular fervor in the streets, one question to ask ourselves is this: when will it come to America?

Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future
by Jean M. Twenge
Published 25 Apr 2023

It was the biggest financial crisis the country had faced since the Great Depression of the 1930s, earning it the label the Great Recession. Many Americans were angry that Wall Street firms were bailed out when regular people received little help. These feelings culminated in Occupy Wall Street, a protest that pitched tents in Zuccotti Park in the New York Financial District beginning in September 2011. The protest’s slogan, “We are the 99%,” referred to the wealth gap between the richest 1% of the population and the other 99%, a measure of income inequality that had increased sharply since the 1970s. On November 15, the New York City police evicted the protestors from the park, bringing an end to the protest. Although the action itself was over, the issues Occupy highlighted shaped a generation of progressive activists.

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On Tumblr and other sites, young people posted pictures of themselves holding handwritten notes about their dire financial straits. “There was no single objective but hundreds, or none, depending on whom you asked,” wrote Millennial Charlotte Alter. Still, Alter says, Occupy “gave language to a vague feeling that the vast majority of hardworking Americans were being screwed by a greedy elite: ‘We are the 99%’ would become the rallying cry of the many against the few.” Without the Occupy protest, Alter argues, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders would not have run for president, and Millennial U.S. representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (known as AOC) would probably not be in Congress. Ocasio-Cortez (b. 1989), first elected in 2018, was a walking object lesson in how to use social media the Millennial way, letting her followers in on her new experiences with a conspiratorial style.

End This Depression Now!
by Paul Krugman
Published 30 Apr 2012

High school teachers generally have both college and postgraduate degrees; they have not, to put it mildly, seen the kinds of income gains that hedge fund managers have experienced. Remember, again, how twenty-five fund managers made three times as much money as the eighty thousand New York City schoolteachers. The Occupy Wall Street movement rallied around a slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” which got much closer to the truth than the usual establishment talk about education and skill differentials. And it’s not just radicals who are saying this. Last fall the painstakingly nonpartisan, ultra-respectable Congressional Budget Office (CBO) put out a report detailing the rise in inequality between 1979 and 2007; it found that Americans in the 80th to 99th percentiles—that is, Bernanke’s top 20 percent, minus OWS’s 1 percent—had seen an income rise of 65 percent over that period.

Revolting!: How the Establishment Are Undermining Democracy and What They're Afraid Of
by Mick Hume
Published 23 Feb 2017

The mythical democratic subject ‘formed in the space between’ the local and the global seems to be floating around the globe (or at least the World Wide Web) adrift from notions of accountability and responsibility. Thus they can assume the ‘democratic’ right to speak on behalf of the global masses, without any need to ask those people what they might think or want. The famous slogan of the Occupy movements that camped out in various Western cities asserted, ‘We are the 99 per cent!’ A bold claim from protests that did not even number anywhere near 1 per cent. These ‘new democratic subjects’ have redefined democracy to mean staging media-oriented protests ‘on behalf of’ the passive populace, whether the people want it or not. They are speaking for a ‘new global civic society’ that exists in their imagination and web forums rather than on the streets.

Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby
by Sau Sheong Chang
Published 27 Jun 2012

Lorenz curves showing inequality over time As expected, inequality increases over time—that is, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This is a simple simulation, so how does it reflect the real world? One of the major catchphrases in the “Occupy Wall Street” protest movement that started in 2011 is “We are the 99%,” which refers to the unequal distribution of wealth in America. The protesters have also accused Wall Street and corporations of risky lending practices that eventually caused the economic crisis of 2008, and have protested against corporate money in politics. These claims are not without merit.

Inequality and the 1%
by Danny Dorling
Published 6 Oct 2014

It may even be one of the best measures of inequality to consider in terms of how simple a target it may be for effective social policy.12 Economists have measured the fortunes of the best-off 1 per cent for decades. Only recently have political activists, campaigners, and even those anarchists who most distrust economists become as interested in these statistics. In 2011 David Graeber was credited with coining the phrase ‘We are the 99 per cent’, and so made the best-off 1 per cent the object of opposition. And with that phrase came what appeared to be new home truths. For example, for the 99 per cent, as Graeber explains, for most people ‘the fear of losing your job is far greater than the hope of finding a truly fulfilling one’.13 However, not all of the 99 per cent are unfulfilled, and many of the 1 per cent undertake work they find dull just to remain in that income bracket – though their income often means that in the rest of life they have choices that others can only dream of, other than the choice to be normal.

The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay
by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman
Published 14 Oct 2019

With an average income of $220,000 and everything that goes with it—spacious suburban houses, expensive private schools for their children, well-funded pensions, and good health insurance—they are not struggling. But as a group they do not have much in common with the 1% (the 2.4 million richest Americans), whose members make $1.5 million in income a year on average. THE GAINS OF THE 1%: AS LARGE AS THE LOSSES OF THE BOTTOM 50% Since the emergence of the slogan “We are the 99%,” the public has become familiar with the divergence between the fortunes of the rich and those of the rest of society. But the idea bears repeating, because it reflects a fundamental truth about the American economy: over the last few decades, income has skyrocketed for those at the very top of the income distribution, and nowhere else.

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism
by Rick Wartzman
Published 15 Nov 2022

The Washington Post called it “a protest movement without clear demands.” But on this October day, there was nothing amorphous about what one group who had come to the park was trying to accomplish: they wanted Walmart to raise workers’ wages. “We’re here today to let the people at Occupy Wall Street know that Walmart’s associates stand with them; we are the 99 percent,” said Girshriela Green, who had gone to work at the company in 2009 as a part-timer in the Crenshaw neighborhood of Los Angeles. After several raises and a promotion to manager of the health and beauty department, she had seen her pay climb—but not by much. After starting at $8.20 an hour, Green had reached $9.80 before hurting her arm on the job, an injury that she blamed on having to manually haul 100 heavy boxes each day because of understaffing at her store.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
by Philip Mirowski
Published 24 Jun 2013

When not openly appealing to a lost world, like the “Take Back the American Dream” motif, they would propose “reforms” dating back to the 1980s, such as the Tobin tax on financial transactions, or a “fairness doctrine” for political ads, or an ineffectual public financing scheme for election campaigns. Mostly in the heat of Occupy, disputations over the crisis and financial sector were dominated by backward-looking ambitions and nostalgia for a happier and more prosperous time. Slogans like “We are the 99%” seemed to be calculated so as to be overly inclusive, confusing expansiveness with democracy, and therefore ineffectual. But even those wistful recollections were selective. The Occupiers were disdainful of close ties to trade unions, only to witness their own dreams of a General Strike fizzle in May 2012.

…

Likewise, since no one will ever staunch the roiling financialization of the modern economy, we might as well concoct even more new “financial instruments” and baroque trading procedures to make people feel a bit more that the market is really on their side. Some wet blankets such as Nouriel Roubini, Simon Johnson, and Richard Bookstaber may denounce certain aspects of securitization; but they just don’t understand: The Occupy Wall Street and Occupy London people say “We are the 99%.” There’s an increasing concern with unequal distribution of wealth, and finance is perceived as the villain in all of this. But I’m thinking it can’t be the villain; finance is a technology that can, if it’s properly applied, help reduce inequality if it’s applied to everyone. So I think that people who are in finance today have a moral obligation to help advance the trend toward democratisation of finance.48 So how will more financial engineering help us out of the hole left by the global crisis?

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2012

It says: "We the people are determined to take back our country from the moneyed powers that currently run it. Our aim is to prove Warren Buffett wrong. His class, the rich, shall no longer rule unchallenged nor automatically inherit the earth. Nor is his class, the rich, always destined to win:' It says: "We are the 99 p ercent. We have the majority and this majority can, must and shall prevail. Since all other channels of expression are closed to us by money power, we have no other option except to occupy the parks, squares and streets of our cities until our opinions are heard and our needs attended to:' To succeed, the movement has to reach out to the 99 percent.

The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives
by Lisa Servon
Published 10 Jan 2017

Those benefits have been eroded, leaving individuals to cope with the unexpected and unfortunate events that happen to all of us. As Jacob Hacker, author of The Great Risk Shift, argues, “More and more economic risk has been offloaded by government and corporations onto the increasingly fragile balance sheets of workers and their families.” Rising inequality also plays a role. The Occupy movement, with its slogan “We are the 99 percent,” drew attention to this inequality in the wake of the financial crisis. Worldwide, people took to the streets to protest corporate greed and broken social contracts. The New York City incarnation of the movement, Occupy Wall Street, placed the financial sector at the center of the problem.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

They mocked its willful anarchism and lack of leadership, which led to endless, late-night-college-dorm-room-like debates with no resolution and enabled random individuals to determine the shape of protests—like the man with a doctrinaire contempt for all politicians who perversely blocked the civil rights hero Representative John Lewis from speaking at an Atlanta rally. But Occupy’s central message about the “1 percent” caught on. Like the Tea Party on the right, Occupy was a response to the financial crash of 2008 and its fallout on the working and middle classes, and as inequality snowballed across the world, its cry of “we are the 99 percent” went from being a left-wing meme circulating on social media to a trope increasingly used by politicians, journalists, even TV and ad copy writers. The long-term effects of the Occupy movement would become apparent only in retrospect, as its alumni helped staff Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign and started an array of progressive groups intent on nudging the Democratic Party to the left.

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy
by Chris Hayes
Published 11 Jun 2012

To recover from the damage inflicted by the Crisis of Authority, we will be forced to reconstruct and reinvent our politics, a process that has, in a sense, already begun. Andrew Smith, an organizer with Occupy Wall Street, told me one fall evening in 2011 that the movement is not “Left or right, but up or down.” Amid drums and whoops and chants of “We! Are! The 99 percent!” he leaned in and said, “I realize that’s scary for some people.” Beyond left and right isn’t just a motto. Those most devoted to the deepest kinds of structural reform of the system are insistent that they do not fall along the traditional left-right axis. Just as elite failure claims a seemingly unrelated number of victims—the Palm Beach retiree bankrupted by Bernie Madoff and the child left homeless after his mother’s home was foreclosed—so, too, will you find that among those clued in to elite failure, left/right distinctions are less salient than those between what I call insurrectionists and institutionalists.

Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits
by Kevin Roose
Published 18 Feb 2014

Over the next few months, of course, Occupy Wall Street would grow from a park gathering into a global protest movement whose reach extended far beyond New York. Within a month, the Zuccotti Park protest had spawned satellite protests in every major American metropolis, and international cities as far-flung as Sydney, Tokyo, and Davos, Switzerland. Occupy’s galvanizing slogan—“We are the 99 percent”—became an international cultural meme, and for weeks, the movement garnered front-page news coverage and made Wall Street bankers very nervous. “I just hope they don’t bomb us,” one Goldman Sachs analyst told me, half-seriously. “We’re the easiest target, if you think about it.” Many of the older, senior-level financiers I spoke to in the following weeks either ignored Occupy, pooh-poohed its aims as too unspecific and vague, or dismissed it as a group of drug-addled dropouts and vagrants who had nothing better to do with their time.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil
Published 25 Feb 2020

Reaction images started as a trend on Tumblr, a platform where scrapbooks became an interactive experience. In the beginning, Tumblr was general, like a blog but faster. The Tumblr browser extension could quickly highlight and post text and images from elsewhere on the web. It was a platform for political commentary and personal diary-like entries at first. Occupy Wall Street even had a Tumblr, “We are the 99%,” that was its online focal point, where activists shared their faces and their stories of financial hardship. But writing original text and uploading original images felt slow, too slow for this particular platform, so capture and collage became a more common way of communicating on it. The perspective was also different from blogging in its thematic adherence.

Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen
by James Suzman
Published 10 Jul 2017

Interviews with “occupiers” yielded contradictory, speculative, and sometimes bewildering responses expressing a general dissatisfaction with the world and the urge to “eat the rich.” But this was because the Occupy movement defined itself by standing against many things while standing for nothing in particular. In the end, this ensemble of discordant voices found episodic moments of harmony around the rallying call of “We are the 99 percent!”—a slogan that captured one thing they could all agree on: they were all angry about what they saw to be rampant material and social inequality. What was particularly striking about the Occupy movement’s focus on inequality was that few of the occupiers were particularly preoccupied with poverty in any absolute sense.

Hunger: The Oldest Problem
by Martin Caparros
Published 14 Jan 2020

Stiglitz ends the article with a warning: “The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.”6 The slogan spread quickly. In a few days, many spoke about the 99 and the 1 percent: politicians, journalists, advertisers, people. “We are the 99 percent,” became the battle cry. (In the United States, 10 percent of the population controls 76 percent of the national wealth, but what counted at that moment was that 1 percent.)7 Certainties were established. Suddenly the issue of inequality became a spot of common ground. The notion of inequality was established in relation to those who had accumulated too much.

…

In the same way, the enemy of that new and unlikely club of the rich and the poor, the marginal and the super-integrated, the oppressors and the oppressed that this 99 percent slogan proposed, was that 1 percent, the ones who’ve gone over the top. They are so grotesque, so excessive, that it is possible to assert that everybody else has something in common. (Do the people in the United States who chant “We are the 99 percent” realize that they, all together, are more or less the 1 percent of the world?) The 99 percent slogan brings up the subject of extreme wealth, not that of wealth, property, ways of appropriating wealth. (Lately, it seems that all discussions stop at the door of private property: it’s the non plus ultra of these times, the threshold one cannot cross.

A Fine Mess
by T. R. Reid
Published 13 Mar 2017

Census data showed that median income for the average American family actually fell by 8.6% in the first fourteen years of the twenty-first century, while a lucky few at the very top were taking in staggering amounts of money.1 Economists had been tracking the imbalance of wealth in the United States and other advanced democracies for several years; indeed, Thomas Piketty was one of the pioneers of this line of research. Inequality as a political issue caught the public’s attention in the summer of 2011, when a ragtag group of protesters in New York City set up tents in a small park not far from the financial district and declared themselves the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. “We Are the 99%,” their banner read; the protesters loudly declared that 99% of Americans were getting the shaft because of the economic and political clout of the richest 1%. Almost overnight, similar encampments with similar banners sprang up in city parks around the country and overseas; by mid-October, the Washington Post tallied more than nine hundred Occupy gatherings in eighty different nations.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

The assortment of slogans and causes associated with Occupy testifies to an explosion of suppressed anger and a proliferation of political demands that otherwise went unheard. Even among those who did not directly participate in the occupations, Occupy provided a platform for the excluded in websites such as the ‘We are the 99 Percent’ Tumblr, with a chorus of voices protesting against economic immiseration and social exclusion.24 Beyond any direct political result, the opportunity for the frustrations of the excluded to be publicly aired was inspiring and empowering for many. Occupy also worked to disrupt the ordinary lives of both participants and observers, and allowed people to participate together in a shared political project.

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets
by John Plender
Published 27 Jul 2015

Indeed, a recent paper from the IMF – not generally regarded as a left-wing body – refers to the tentative consensus in the literature that inequality can undermine progress in health and education, cause investment-reducing political and economic instability, and undercut the social consensus required to adjust in the face of shocks, and thus that it tends to reduce the pace and durability of growth.215 And it has undoubtedly contributed to anti-business sentiment. Poll evidence suggests that an erosion of trust in business reflects ordinary people’s inability to see any moral connection between effort and reward at the top end of industry and commerce.216 That concern was evident in the Occupy Wall Street movement, with its slogan ‘we are the 99 per cent’, together with other, similar protest movements around the world. The debate on how to share the spoils of the system also gives rise to questions at the level of the company. In the Anglosphere, the shareholder-capitalist is seen as the key stakeholder in the system, enjoying the residual right to corporate profits after the claims of labour and all other creditors have been met.

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril
by Satyajit Das
Published 9 Feb 2016

There are personal grievances: lost jobs, lack of unemployment benefits, pension cuts, mortgage foreclosures, homelessness, college fees, or student loans. But there are also wider issues: the widening economic and social gap, the financialization of the economy, allocation of the responsibility and burden of the GFC, disenfranchisement of voters, and inequality. The Guy Fawkes mask and the “We are the 99 percent” chant, first heard in New York's Zuccotti Park, are emblems of a moral protest. The 1 percent saw it as violent revolution. An Occupy poster retorted: “They don't call it class warfare until we fight back.” The 1 percent argue that their wealth is the result of hard work. People are not of equal ability, they claim.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy
by David Gelles
Published 30 May 2022

And as the true impunity of those responsible came into focus—no one who had a major hand in causing the crisis faced real consequences—that outrage spilled onto the streets. Egged on by the anti-capitalist magazine Adbusters, a group of protesters descended on Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan in September 2011, and the Occupy Wall Street movement was born. With the slogan “We are the 99 percent,” one protest spawned another, and what started in New York spread to Oakland, London, and dozens of other cities around the world. People were outraged that wages were so low and employment seemed so tenuous for so many. They were furious that corporations got bailed out, and that none of the parties responsible for the financial crisis had been held accountable.

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class
by Jeff Faux
Published 16 May 2012

Within a year the wistful political paralysis of the Jon Stewart rally gave way to the angry confrontations of Occupy Wall Street (OWS). In mid-September 2011, a loose network of largely young activists—inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East and the large protests against austerity in Europe—took over Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan in the geographic heart of the financial plutocracy. Their slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” referred to the doubling of the share of income going to the richest 1 percent of Americans since 1979. From the encampment emerged daily demonstrations, teach-ins, and efforts to engage employees going to work at the banks and investment houses. The movement quickly spread to hundreds of other cities.

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions
by Paul Mason
Published 30 Sep 2013

RIM, the maker of Blackberry, quickly pledged to do what it could to unsecure the data. However, in response to increased surveillance and repression, activists have evolved new uses for social media. Tumblr emerged as the platform of choice of the Occupy movement in America after it hosted the viral ‘We are the 99%’ blog. The blog, and the ‘99%’ meme it created, form a case study in the mass dissemination of ideas possible with social media. The slogan itself originated at a general assembly in New York’s Zuccotti Park in August: a blogger posted an appeal for posed photographs with one-line summaries of their subject’s economic problems.

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
by Owen Jones
Published 14 Jul 2011

They were, in part, inspired by the Spanish indignados (outraged) who had occupied Madrid's main square the previous May in protest at the Spanish government's response to the banking crisis; they, in tum, had followed the example of Egyptian revolutionaries who had taken Cairo's Tahrir Square. The New York protests spawned a global 'Occupy' movement, as similar camps were set up in hundreds of cities across the globe-including London, where tents were erected outside St Paul's Cathedral. The key slogan of the Occupy movement, 'We are the 99 per cent', reflected that the interests of the overwhelming majority of people conflicted with those of the elite 1 per cent at the top. It may not have been an accurate figure, but that wasn't the point: the slogan tapped into a deep sense of injustice that had taken root since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason
by William Davies
Published 26 Feb 2019

But they have taken on a fresh sense of purpose since the global financial crisis of 2007–9, especially on the left. The Occupy movement that emerged in 2011 to protest against the banks made public assembly its central political purpose, and took the cold, scientific language of statistics and turned it into a mobilizing identity with the famous slogan “we are the 99%.” Left-wing leaders, such as Alexis Tsipras in Greece, Pablo Iglesias in Spain and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, have placed renewed political emphasis on the ability to bring large numbers of people together in public spaces. Here too, the size of rallies stirs a range of emotions from both supporters and opponents: exuberance, scorn, empathy, misinformation, hope, and resentment.

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
by Martin Gurri
Published 13 Nov 2018

They organized on the web so they could occupy a physical space, and they occupied a physical space so they could talk about it online. More completely than the other protesters of 2011, they were creatures of the Fifth Wave, able to extend their reach digitally beyond their small numbers. The We Are the 99 Percent campaign on Tumblr, in which ordinary people told their stories of victimization on a single sheet of paper, had a tremendous impact on liberal commentators and the news media in general. Every Occupy site had an elaborate Facebook page. Every violent act by a cop trying to dislodge a young Occupier was caught on mobile phone video and posted online.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
by Joel Kotkin
Published 11 May 2020

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the proletarianization of the middle class resulted in widespread support for Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism.42 Today, as in Europe before World War II, people on both right and left often blame financial institutions for their precarious situation.43 Anger at the financial services sector gave rise to the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City and the many spinoff Occupy protests in 2011–12. Marching under the slogan “We are the 99 percent,” protesters around the world decried the heavy concentration of wealth in a few hands. Alienation from the political mainstream today is resulting in strong support for far-left parties and candidates among youth in various high-income countries.44 In France’s presidential election of 2017, the former Trotskyite Jean-Luc Mélenchon won the under-24 vote, beating the more youthful Emmanuel Macron by almost two to one among that age group.45 In the United Kingdom, the Labour Party under the neo-Marxist Jeremy Corbyn in 2018 won more than 60 percent of the under-40 vote, while the Conservatives got just 23 percent.46 He won the youth vote similarly in 2020, even amidst a crushing electoral defeat.

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War
by Jeff Sharlet
Published 21 Mar 2023

There were at least 1,000 occupations, a gritty spiral jetty of anarchist punks and construction workers, cooks and nannies and librarians—lots of librarians—and Teamsters and priests and immigrants, “legal” and otherwise. Some occupations drew tens of thousands, most a few hundred, some no more than one earnest soul on the side of the road with a sign that said we are the 99%. What did they want? They made no demands. They drove the press and even the politicians who might have been allies—“it expresses the frustrations the American people,” said President Obama—mad by refusing the very idea of demands. They met nightly in “general assemblies” to which you elected yourself simply by being there.

Good Times, Bad Times: The Welfare Myth of Them and Us
by John Hills
Published 6 Nov 2014

Information from the World Top Incomes database, established by Tony Atkinson, Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, shows that the after tax incomes of the top 1 per cent in the UK doubled from 4.7 of the national total in 1979 to 9.5 per cent in 1996 and 12.6 per cent on the eve of the economic crisis in 2007.48 There was a change in definition between 1989 and 1990 (when independent taxation was brought in), but even excluding the change over that period, the overall increase in their share over that period – just under 7 percentage points – was enough to account for the gain of the whole top 10 per cent. In this sense, the slogan ‘We are the 99 per cent’ has some bite – it was the top 1 per cent whose share was increasing, while the shares of other groups lost ground or stood still. What has happened to the shares of the very top since 2007 is less clear, especially as top taxpayers adjusted which years they officially received their incomes in to avoid the ones when the top rate of Income Tax was 50 per cent.

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire
by Bruce Nussbaum
Published 5 Mar 2013

As Americans began to feel the effects of the Great Recession, it became clear that the economic benefits of the New Economy disproportionately went to a tiny elite, while the vast middle class saw immiseration and downward mobility. We witnessed an inequality gap that hadn’t been as wide since the 1920s and the Great Depression. The Occupy Wall Street movement, with its rallying cry “We are the 99 percent,” crystallized the sense that something needed to change. You knew something fundamental was about to change when both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street found a common enemy, publicly blaming “Crony Capitalism” for destroying the American Dream. Even while the New Economy was at its peak, alternative ways of thinking and doing had begun springing up around the nation.

The Meritocracy Myth
by Stephen J. McNamee
Published 17 Jul 2013

This was most evident with the rise of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. Starting in September 2011, protesters convened in Zuccotti Park located in the Wall Street financial district, drawing attention to economic inequality and specifically banks and investors that had triggered the recession. The OWS slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” referred to the top 1 percent of the population in which wealth is highly concentrated compared to everyone else. OWS groups sprung up in many other cities in the United States and around the world. The initial occupation of Zuccotti Park ended in December 2011 when the New York City Police forced occupiers to leave the park, presumably because of health and sanitation concerns.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond
by Daniel Susskind
Published 14 Jan 2020

Focusing our attention on that richest fraction of society gives us a third approach to the issue, known as “top income inequality” or just “top inequality.” This measure has captured the imagination of protesters and public commentators in the last decade, with “The One Percent” becoming a well-known label and “We are the 99 Percent” the battle cry of the Occupy Movement. Their frustration is not without cause: the proportion of total income that goes to the 1 percent who earn the most, particularly in developed countries, has increased significantly. In the United States and the UK, that share has almost doubled over the last few decades.15 Figure 8.3 shows that much the same story is unfolding elsewhere.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab
Published 7 Jan 2021

Guy Standing, a British economist, even coined the term precariat, to point to “an emerging class, comprising the rapidly growing number of people facing lives of insecurity, moving in and out of jobs that give little meaning to their lives.”43 Seen from this perspective, it is no wonder that in 2011, a one-page call for action in an activist magazine led to one of the most supported American protest movements of this century. The page in AdBusters read, “17 September. Wall Street. Bring Tent.” Protestors did in fact show up in lower Manhattan on that day, they brought tents, and with that, Occupy Wall Street was born. Referencing the extreme inequality in America, the movement's rallying cry became “We are the 99 percent,” and the protestors decried the wealth, income, and power accumulated by the 1 percent richest individuals and corporations in America. As you can see from Figure 2.4, this dichotomy between the 1 percent and the rest of income earners was not imaginary. The same pattern exists in other parts of the world, and in some countries the outrage over these inequalities has erupted with equal force as it has in the English-speaking world.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

Guy Standing, a British economist, even coined the term precariat, to point to “an emerging class, comprising the rapidly growing number of people facing lives of insecurity, moving in and out of jobs that give little meaning to their lives.”43 Seen from this perspective, it is no wonder that in 2011, a one-page call for action in an activist magazine led to one of the most supported American protest movements of this century. The page in AdBusters read, “17 September. Wall Street. Bring Tent.” Protestors did in fact show up in lower Manhattan on that day, they brought tents, and with that, Occupy Wall Street was born. Referencing the extreme inequality in America, the movement's rallying cry became “We are the 99 percent,” and the protestors decried the wealth, income, and power accumulated by the 1 percent richest individuals and corporations in America. As you can see from Figure 2.4, this dichotomy between the 1 percent and the rest of income earners was not imaginary. The same pattern exists in other parts of the world, and in some countries the outrage over these inequalities has erupted with equal force as it has in the English-speaking world.

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna
Published 23 May 2016

“Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey: Employment-Population Ratio.” United States Department of Labor. Retrieved from data.bls.gov. Disillusioned by the “recovery” that wasn’t (see Figure 8-1), in September 2011, several hundred people came together under the slogan “We are the 99%” and occupied New York City’s Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street, in protest. What in another time and place might have remained an obscure act of civil disobedience instead found a discouraged global public willing to join in. Within a month, the Occupy movement had spread to over 950 cities in 82 countries across five continents.

Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence
by Rachel Sherman
Published 21 Aug 2017

It is tempting to think of wealthy people as only the ones we see talked about in the media. But these representations tend to feature the super-wealthy, those in the top .1 percent or above. We might, instead, choose the top 1 percent, a definition often used in scholarly analysis and popularized by Occupy. The political focus on this category, through the slogan “We are the 99%,” brought attention to inequality in a powerful way. But it also homogenized the 99 percent rather than acknowledging differences between, say, the top 2 percent and the bottom 50 percent.49 Noting some of these issues, Lauren Rivera has advocated defining elites as the top 20 percent because of this group’s educational advantages.50 I chose to start my study by seeking participants with annual household incomes of $250,000, which is in the top 5 percent in New York City.51 I also decided to look for people in their thirties and forties who had children, as I believed that such people would be especially likely to be making important lifestyle decisions such as buying homes and choosing schools.

Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump
by Tom Clark and Anthony Heath
Published 23 Jun 2014

Disabled ‘Stephanie’ in Luton said: ‘We just feel like we are beggars, sitting there with our hands out.’ Few human beings in that frame of mind will have the confidence to round on their accusers; instead the instinct is to acquit oneself by finding someone else to point the finger at. ♦♦♦ ‘We are the 99%’ is the great slogan of the Occupy protesters. It is a slogan justified by reference to the income distribution statistics, and one that sounds as if it ought to be able to rally a crushing electoral majority. But the numerical prevalence of the squeezed majority is, in fact, a weakness as well as a strength – identities within any ‘group’ that claims to cover anything like 99% of people are likely to be more defined by divisions than anything else.49 Yes, ‘the 1%’ has grabbed the lion's share of growth over many years – and everyone else has a legitimate grievance about that.

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems
by Linda Yueh
Published 4 Jun 2018

However, the group of around 3,000 people simply gathered instead outside nearby St Paul’s Cathedral, where an indefinite camp was established. A month earlier a similar encampment had been set up in New York’s Wall Street, and soon protests of different sizes emerged in cities around the world. Occupy’s slogan, ‘We are the 99 per cent’, referred to the high proportion of global wealth accounted for by the top 1 per cent of the distribution. They reflected the widespread public anger in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. The protesters called for financial reform, a fairer distribution of income and wealth and a rejection of austerity.

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today
by Linda Yueh
Published 15 Mar 2018

However, the group of around 3,000 people simply gathered instead outside nearby St Paul’s Cathedral, where an indefinite camp was established. A month earlier a similar encampment had been set up in New York’s Wall Street, and soon protests of different sizes emerged in cities around the world. Occupy’s slogan, ‘We are the 99 per cent’, referred to the high proportion of global wealth accounted for by the top 1 per cent of the distribution. They reflected the widespread public anger in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. The protesters called for financial reform, a fairer distribution of income and wealth and a rejection of austerity.

Brazillionaires: The Godfathers of Modern Brazil
by Alex Cuadros
Published 1 Jun 2016

When Bloomberg started putting together a team of journalists to cover the ultra-rich, the timing was apt, if unintentionally so. It was the fall of 2011, and protesters had just set up tents in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, calling their movement Occupy Wall Street. They had a lot of messages, but the one that resonated was the simplest: We are the 99 percent. The movement divided America into the ninety-nine percent of people who took the brunt of the financial crash and the richest one percent—the bankers involved in the crash, especially—who seemed to suffer no consequences. The one percent, though, covered a lot of people. Most were professionals and managers who lacked much power on their own.

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers
by Andy Greenberg
Published 12 Sep 2012

CONCLUSION THE MACHINE In New York’s Zuccotti Park, the epicenter of a global anticapitalist and anticorruption movement that began in the fall of 2011 under the name Occupy Wall Street, protesters adopt the same tactics of angry, confrontational nonviolence that Birgitta Jónsdóttir used in the Icelandic Revolution of 2009, that Daniel Ellsberg and Phil Zimmermann used in their Cold War protests for nuclear disarmament, that John Young used in the Columbia University Occupation of 1968. They chant slogans, acquiesce to arrest without resistance, and carry signs: “We are the 99%,” “Robin Hood Was Right,” “Free Assange,” and “Free Bradley Manning.” And they also carry cell phones, almost all of which contain a video camera. Video clips that have emerged from the protests on websites like YouTube and LiveLeak include one of police pushing into crowds of demonstrators on the Brooklyn Bridge, grabbing protesters seemingly at random, and dragging them out to be arrested as the crowd chants, “The whole world is watching.”

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest
by Zeynep Tufekci
Published 14 May 2017

Almost every day brought new messages of support and solidarity and news of other occupations popping up around the country. Here was a popular protest, an emergent movement that addressed one of the most important fault lines developing in Western nations, the one between the super-rich and the rest of the population. It had a catchy slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” explicitly pitting the protesters against the richest 1 percent. The occupation was located at the heart of a media-rich environment. It should have been major news. But it was not. If it had not been for social media, where the occupation flourished as a topic through hastily set-up Facebook pages and Twitter accounts that shared news, pictures, videos from the protests, and even live-streaming of its general assemblies, the movement might have hit a wall because of lack of attention.

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire
by Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson
Published 15 Jan 2019

As Matthew Stewart, who has written widely on the origins and future of the USA, explains: As of 2016, it took $1.2 million in net worth to make it into the 9.9 per cent; $2.4 million to reach the group’s median; and $10 million to get into the top 0.9 per cent. (And if you’re not there yet, relax: Our club is open to people who are on the right track and have the right attitude.) ‘We are the 99 per cent’ sounds righteous, but it’s a slogan, not an analysis. The families at our end of the spectrum wouldn’t know what to do with a pitchfork. We are also mostly, but not entirely, white.85 Britain has been looking towards the wrong nation for guidance – the USA, a country whose rulers have largely hated immigrants for some time, despite hosting an economy that always required more labour, and despite now being made up almost entirely of the descendants of immigrants.

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency
by Parmy Olson
Published 5 Jun 2012

The FBI said that they were “chopping off the head of LulzSec,” but by March of 2012, after LulzSec had been disbanded for more than nine months, other hacker cells were taking up the Antisec cause; in February of 2012 alone, supporters of Anonymous had taken credit for attacking the websites of the CIA, Interpol, Citigroup, and a string of banks in Brazil, among other targets. Then there was the growing international movement called “Occupy,” which emerged in September 2011 and saw tens of thousands take to the streets in major capitals to protest social and economic inequality, often using the slogan “We are the 99%.” Activist-style supporters of Anonymous largely showed their support for Occupy, promoting it on Twitter and blogs and wearing the V for Vendetta masks at protests. Police had arrested more than 6,800 people in connection with the Occupy movement as of April 2012, by which time it had gone into hiatus.

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
by George Packer
Published 4 Mar 2014

Kevin knew about the sins of Wall Street, but the level of the protesters’ vitriol surprised him. If they wanted change, they’d have to appeal to the better angels of a banker’s nature. From lower Manhattan, the protean flame spread around the country and the world. Within weeks there were twenty-five, fifty, a hundred occupations. The movement’s slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” was simple and capacious enough to cover a multitude of discontents and desires. It became the name of a blog on Tumblr that collected a gallery of hundreds of faces in snapshots sent by readers, some obscured or half hidden by the anonymous autobiographical statement that each person wrote down on a piece of paper and held up for the camera.

Peggy Seeger
by Jean R. Freedman

“Declaration of the Occupation of New York City,” September 29, 2011, http://www.nycga.net/resources/documents/declaration/, accessed June 30, 2016. 4. This line refers to economic divisions between the top 1 percent of the population and the remaining 99 percent. One of the rallying cries of the Occupy movements was, “We are the 99 percent.” 5. “The Anticapitalist Roadshow,” http://www.redmagic.co.uk/anticap/index.htm, accessed June 30, 2016. 6. Frankie Armstrong, email message to the author, December 8, 2012. 7. Peggy Seeger, email message to the author, September 3, 2014. 8. Peggy Seeger, email message to the author, August 15, 2012. 9.

In Pursuit of Privilege: A History of New York City's Upper Class and the Making of a Metropolis
by Clifton Hood
Published 1 Nov 2016

Cultural values and social practices that had been new and fluid in the early 1970s had hardened, forming a cultural system that was becoming as inflexible as Victorianism had once been. The corporate elite was hardly immune to attack. In 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement arose in New York and in other cities in the United States and abroad, and its slogan “We Are the 99%” galvanized fears and anger that had been building since the 2008 financial crisis over the inequities of corporate capitalism and the mounting concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few in New York City and elsewhere. Two years later, Bill De Blasio won election as mayor of New York City in a landslide that represented a backlash against the administration of incumbent Mayor Michael R.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century
by Thomas Piketty
Published 10 Mar 2014

To return for a moment to the Occupy Wall Street movement, what it shows is that the use of a common terminology, and in particular the concept of the “top centile,” though it may at first glance seem somewhat abstract, can be helpful in revealing the spectacular growth of inequality and may therefore serve as a useful tool for social interpretation and criticism. Even mass social movements can avail themselves of such a tool to develop unusual mobilizing themes, such as “We are the 99 percent!” This might seem surprising at first sight, until we remember that the title of the famous pamphlet that Abbé Sieyès published in January 1789 was “What Is the Third Estate?”8 I should also make it clear that the hierarchies (and therefore centiles and deciles) of income are not the same as those of wealth.

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World
by Adam Tooze
Published 31 Jul 2018

In October 2013 two French economists, one working in California, the other back in Paris, published the latest release of a long-running project on American inequality.14 Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty were at this point not unknown. An earlier paper in which they mapped top incomes in the United States over the long run had yielded the “We are the 99 percent” slogan that the Occupy movement had used to such good effect.15 Nevertheless, the data they released in October 2013 were astonishing. From the latest round of tax releases they calculated that of the growth generated by the economic recovery since 2009, 95 percent had been monopolized by the top 1 percent.