“the big banners and posters are useless”

I don’t know. In my small Facebook world, I’ve seen plenty of people who normally don’t give a blink for serious issues suddenly show great interest in Occupy Wall Street precisely because so many pictures of heartfelt/ amusing/ outrageous banners and placards are being circulated

I know my then 6-year-old daughter became vehemently anti-Bush at the anti-Iraq march after being taken by a woman and a rastafarian both holding the placard ‘the only bush I trust is my own’.

Keep ‘em flying I say

I agree it’d be good to see union involvement (though there may already be some) but there is indeed the danger of making it look like a takeover rather than co-operation. What seems to have been successful at Wall St in this regard has been local union branches offering support. Perhaps contact with the City of London and Westminster Trades Council (a non-workplace specific organisation) seeking input might help (if it’s not already there), rather than seeking out the head union honchos.

I’d agree Sunny. To me, the big ideologically-charged banners just make the camp seem alienating to those who are potential supporters but who are more middle-of-the-road. An average parent with two children walking past the camp is unlikely to be able to identify with vague sentiments about destroying capitalism, but something more practical such as statistics about inequality is something she or he would be able to talk to their children about and support probably.

I suggested this at one of the general assemblies of the camp. Protest shouldn’t be about using cliquey terms and name-dropping old radical theorists. It should engage passers-by with practical insights that are currently relevant to peoples’ lives.

[3] And what did they say?

More generally, well done Sunny – I think this is one of the best pieces you’ve posted here.

Good ideas, but this movement is going nowhere at the moment till a party articulates these ideas politically. I saw the demonstrators interviewed on state TV a couple of days ago; they were young ,many were black, they were smoking and they lived in tents. Now, through their total lack of co-operation with the church, such that the same might burn down at any second, they are potential incendurists by proxy if not outright Devil worshippers. Thats a pretty damming image straight away given the predujices of the moral majority in this country. What we need Sunny is not more of your Hegelian ideas! We need the big guns to step up to the plate. Like others, I am wondering whether these big guns exist and if so, where are they?

I have to question the methodology of combining statistics and protest – statistics are something that have to be explained properly (you cannot really use headline figures alone) which might work with the curious, but not as headlines for passers by/the media.

Incidentally, you cite the US example of good distribution of information, but there are suggestions this might not be the case in reality: http://www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/2011/10/19/billionaire-visits-occupy-wall-street/. I think there is also the problem of whether your statistics once produced will be acceptable to the occupiers – remember the very act of compiling and presenting statistics involves political choices.

As to opposing big business with the unions – I doubt that is a good idea, as it is quite possible for people to regard both sides as equally bad.

Maybe LibCon sohuld set up a wiki on which people could post research and collaboratively develop suitable material.

Maybe LibCon could set up a wiki to allow people to collaboartively do such research and produce materials.

Worth putting the link to the full graphic, which has other interesting data which would also be worth collecting for the UK:

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/09/04/opinion/04reich-graphic.html?ref=sunday

Surely the data is available from ONS. Should be possible to collate it in a day?

If a job’s worth doing, eh sunny?

Ah yes, a New York Times graph showing US incomes as a demonstration of the evils of Thatcher! Of course, she must have been the cause of the fall in bottom quintile incomes in the USA! Waving her evil wand over the Atlantic Ocean. It can’t possibly be anything to do with Deng Xiao Ping allowing the Chinese to work efficiently and export cheap goods to the USA.Thanks to capitalism, chinese incomes have more than trebled and starvation has become a memory. As a consequence one group of Americans whose average income is *more than ten times* the median for some European (not third-world) countries have seen a 4% decline. Only a plump self-satisfied pseudo-intellectual would want to stage a protest over this switch from the relatively wealthy to help the absolutely poor.
A few statistics on the success of anti-capitalists like Pol Pot who murdered 20% of the population of Cambodia or Mao Tse Tung who starved millions to death would certainly help.
There aren’t many useful up-to-date statistics on wealth in the UK because Gordon Brown’s government suppressed them: all we know is that every government from the time they started collecting useful data until 1997 left office with a more equal distribution of wealth than when it started but under New Labour the process reversed and – when they stopped ONS producing data – the share of national wealth owned by the bottom half was only one-third of that which it had held when Mrs Thatcher resigned!

[10] I think Sunny posted US figures as an example of what might be possible, and what’s more I think you know that perfectly well, John.

Since you don’t give any sources for your own statistics we must take it that if anyone were to query them or to suggest that they might be selectively presented they would be suggesting that you were not acting in good faith. And none of us have the right to do that, do we?

So I will ask you a different question. Do you think the world would be a better place if this website, and all the others posing a similar political stance, closed down?

@ Mike Killingworth
i) My data is from ONS, most of which you should still be able to find but at least one set of data was deleted after people noted that the wealth of the bottom half under Blair/Brown was only one one-third of that under Thatcher. You can suggest what you damn well please and lots of people do, but I actually care about getting my data right.
It is possible that, as you say, Sunny just picked up a set of data from the NYT as an example and it just happened that the break came in 1979 which has no particular relevance in the US economy. Just because I have never seen the Tooth Fairy, that does not prove that she does not exist but the posts by Sunny that I have previous read do not incline me to believe in the Tooth Fairy.
ii) I presume that this a rhetorical question as I occasionally comment on this blog. If not, the answer is “No, I believe in free speech – but free speech is not a licence to tell lies so blog sites, like Liberal Conspiracy, that permit replies are preferable to dishonest media that do not.”

If you’re so keen on unions, Sunny, why haven’t you joined one yet. Oh yeah, I forgot, you don’t like me. My bad.

Not sure if you’ll spot this comment, which comes some time after the article, but I just came across the following stats in this area: (via monbiot)

http://www.poverty.org.uk/09/index.shtml#g2

“Four fifths of the total increase in incomes over the last decade [1998/9 to 2009/9] has gone to those with above average incomes and two fifths have gone to those in the richest tenth”

According to: Housesholds Below Average Income, DWP

There are a few references to studies and data worth looking into on this. Hope you can find someone with time to collate stuff going back a bit further and covering the last few years…

@ 14 SATC
Which is one of the reasons why I condemn Gordon Brown. The statistics I use are more reliably informative because a lot of statistics on income refer to taxable income omitting tax-free income from PEPs/ISAs (which soared under New Labour) and capital gains (in the Wilson/Healey era most rich people tried to convert as much income as possible into Capital Gains as the CGT rate was less than half the surtax rate).
Gordon Brown’s economic policies increased inequality – in my view the purpose of a Labour government, even an economically illiterate Labour government, is to help the poor, not to make them worse off than they would have been if Margaret Thatcher was still in power (and not suffering from Alzheimer’s).