Some have never had it so good. You might be mistaken for thinking there was an economic crash not four years ago and that we are living in a recession, but that's because you aren't the 1%. As we saw abroad and now domestically, a leaderless movement has now come to prominence. If successful in nothing else,
Occupy has brought home the message of wealth inequality through the 'We are the 99%'
slogan. The extreme inversion of the scales in the economic clout of the top 1% versus the remaining 99% betrays an uncomfortable truth about our egalitarian and meritocratic societies - that we are actually living in plutocracies. The egalitarian and meritocratic principles of western society are what comprise The American Dream, and yet like a dream we think we're awake. Eisenhower may have warned us about relations between the
state and private contractors during the heights of the New Deal society, but Franklin D Roosevelt spoke in 1938 of a more elementary danger that "among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing". If some members of society have greater private power than others then it logically follows that others have less power. This is the very basic fact that underpins the subversion of liberal democracy.
