Starting Date: 09-17-2012
Starting Time: 4:00pm
201 W Washington
Phoenix, Arizona 85003
United StatesSeptember 17th is the 1-Year Anniversary of the Occupy Wall St. Movement. For those who can't make it to New York for the festivities, Phoenix is going to stand in Solidarity with a march of our own.
There are nearly 150 million persistently poor and near poor people in America who are not responsible for the damage done by the Great Recession. Yet they pay the price.
The poor did not create the deindustrialization of America, unmatched corporate profiteering and greed, more than a decade of foreign wars,...and unregulated tax benefits for the wealthy. When the largest economic institutions in the world were brought to their collective knees, they went crawling to the government's doorstep in search of salvation. The government obliged, allowing Wall Street to socialize its failure on the backs of Main Street Americans. The housing and jobs crisis they created fostered a poverty unseen in generations-- not just in inner-city ghettos and barrios, but also in suburbs crossing all racial, age, and gender lines.
Nearly one-third of the American middle class--mostly families with children--have fallen into poverty. The aftershock of the current economic downturn in reality was a pre-recession tremor rumbling under the surface for at least the past three decades. While the incomes of the richest 1 percent of Americans--those making $380,000 or more--has grown 33 percent in the past 20 years, incomes for 90 percent of Americans--the rest of us--have stagnated or declined. According to IRS data, the average income in 2008 was $33,000. Twenty years prior, the average American in 1988 earned $33,400, adjusted for inflation.
Despite talk of the job market's seeming recovery, it remains harder than ever to find work in America. For many, having a job is still not enough. Even as corporate profits have soared (with 40 percent going to big banks), more adults are in poverty than ever before. Middle class jobs are vanishing. In 2011, high-wage industries accounted for only 14 percent of new jobs. Meanwhile, low-wage work made up almost half of all the job growth. Close to 9 million people said they were working part-time only because they could not find fulltime employment.
Geographical Scope: Metro Conference |
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