OCUPADO

"The richest one percent of this country owns half our country's wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It's bullshit. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it."

-- Gordon Gekko, Wall Street (1987)

Hard to believe something could be so currently relevant, and come from film released 25 years ago.

I caught Moyers and Company this past weekend, where authors Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson were interviewed about their new book Winner Take All Politics: How Washington Made The Rich Richer - And Turned Its Back On The Middle Class. They argue, rather articulately, and with lots of research to back up their claim, about how the inequity in our country was no accident, and that it was politically engineered.

Host Bill Moyers, a respected journalist who's return to PBS has been warmed received, went on to say he considers this book the best he’s seen in detailing “how politicians rewrote the rules to create a winner-take-all economy that favors the 1% over everyone else, putting our once and future middle class in peril.”