This weekend has seen the Occupy Wall Street movement go global. In Rome, alone, some 200,000 people turned out to protest.
Mike Carlton, writing his regular op-ed column in the SMH, very succinctly puts the movement into context.
"We must all hope that the Occupy Wall Street movement is the first wave of a great global uprising against the greed, stupidity and incompetence of the world financial system. It is early days, but the signs are that it might be. Increasingly, the guitar players, hipsters, and starry-eyed dreamers who kicked it off are being joined by middle-class, Main Street Americans infuriated by the havoc brought to their lives by bankers and governments.
Surely now we must recognise that the 1980s capitalist model has run itself off a cliff, as it was always bound to do. Call it Reaganomics or Thatchernomics or supply-side economics, whatever you like, but unshackling the banks to let them rip'n'tear in an explosion of debt upon debt has been an unmitigated disaster.
At the heart of it all was the lie that conservatives cling to even today, the so-called "trickle down theory" that everyone would win if the rich were allowed to get ever richer. Or as the great American economist John Kenneth Galbraith memorably put it: ''If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows."
The money just funnelled upwards and stayed there. Consider these interesting facts:
The richest 1 per cent of Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 90 per cent.
In Britain, half the population holds just 1 per cent of the country's cash. The gap between rich and poor is wider than at any time since World War II.
Forbes magazine, the plutocrats' bible, chortled this year that the world now has 1210 billionaires, up from 1011 last year, with a total worth of some $US4.5 trillion, more than the gross domestic product of Germany."
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